
Glass. 



Book 



THE 



CROWN OF WILD OLIVE 



%\yxtt fferturea 



ON 



WORK, TRAFFIC, AND WAR. 



BY 



JOHN BUSKIN, M.A. 



•And Indeed it should have been of gold, had not Jupiter been so poor.' 

Aristophanes (Plutm). 



*Q. 




ESTABLISHED 



NEW YORK : 
JOHN WILEY & SON, 

15 ASTOR, PLACE. 

1874. 



A\ 

1874- 



TRAN8PBE 
D. O. PUBLIC LIBKABT 

SEP". lO, 3 40 



PREFACE. 



Twenty years ago, there was no lovelier piece of lowland 
scenery in South England, nor any more pathetic in the 
world, by its expression of sweet human character and life, 
than that immediately bordering on the sources of the 
"Wan die, and including the lower moors of Addington, and 
the villages of Bedclington and Carshalton, with all their 
pools and streams. No clearer or diviner waters ever sang 
with constant lips of the' hand which 'giveth rain from 
heaven ; ' no pastures ever lightened in spring time with 
more passionate blossoming ; no sweeter homes ever bah 
lowed the heart of the passer-by with their pride of peaceful 
gladness — fain-hidden — yet full-confessed. The place re- 
mains, or, until a few months ago, remained, nearly 
unchanged in its larger features ; but, with deliberate mind 
I say, that I have never seen anything so ghastly in its 
inner tragic meaning, — not in Pisan Maremma, — not by 
Campagna tomb, — not by the sand-isles of the Torcellan 
shore,— as the slow stealing of aspects of reckless, indolent, 
animal neglect, over the delicate sweetness of that English 



1 V PREFACE. 



scene : nor is any blasphemy or impiety — any frantic saying 
or godless thought — more appalling to me, using the best 
power of judgment I have to discern its sense and scope, 
than the insolent defilings of those springs by the human 
herds that drink of them. Just where the welling of stain- 
less water, trembling and pure, like a body of light, enters 
the pool of Carshalton, cutting itself a radiant channel down 
to the gravel, through warp of feathery weeds, all waving, 
which it traverses with its deep threads of clearness, like 
the chalcedony in moss-agate, starred here and there with 
white grenouillette ; just in the very rush and murmur of 
the first spreading currents, the human wretches of the 
place cast their street and house foulness ; heaps of dust and 
slime, and broken shreds of old metal, and rags of putrid 
clothes ; they having neither energy to cart it away, nor 
decency enough to dig it into the ground, thus shed into 
the stream, to diffuse what venom of it will float and melt, 
far away, in all places where God meant 'those waters to 
bring joy and health. And, in a little pool, behind some 
houses farther in the village, where another spring rises, the 
shattered stones of the well, and of the little fretted channel 
which was long ago built and traced for it by gentler 
hands, lie scattered, each from each, under a ragged bank 
of mortar, and scoria ; and bricklayers' refuse, on one side, 
which the clean water nevertheless chastises to purity ; but 



PREFACE. V 

it cannot conquer the dead earth beyond ; and there, circled 
and coiled under festering scum, the stagnant edge of the 
pool effaces itself into a slope of black slime, the accumula- 
tion of indolent years. Half-a-dozen men, with one day^ 
work, could cleanse those pools, and trim the flowers about 
their banks, and make every breath of summer air above 
them rich with cool balm ; and every glittering wave medi- 
cinal, as if it ran, troubled of angels, from the porch of 
Bethescla. But that day's work is never given, nor will 
be ; nor will any j'03^ be possible to heart of man, for 
evermore, about those wells of English waters. 

When I last left them, I walked up slowly through the 
back streets of Crcydon, from the old church to the hos- 
pital ; and, just on the left, before coming up to the cross- 
ing of the High Street, there was a new public-house built. 
And the front of it was built in so wise manner, that a 
recess of two feet was left below its front windows, between 
them and the street-pavement— a recess too narrow for any 
possible use (for even if it had been occupied by a seat, as 
in old time it might have been, everybody walking along 
the street would have fallen over the legs of the reposing 
wayfarers). But, by way of making this two feet depth of 
freehold land more expressive of the dignity of an esta- 
blishment for the sale of spirituous liquors, it was fenced 
from the pavement by an imposing iron railing, having foil* 



VI PREFACE. 

or five spearheads to the yard of it, and six feet high; con- 
taining as much iron and iron-work, indeed, as could well 
be put into the space ; and by this stately arrangement,- the 
little piece of dead ground within, between wall and street, 
became a protective receptacle of refuse; cigar ends, and 
oyster shells, and the like, such as an open-handed English 
street-populace habitually scatters from its presence, and 
was thus left, unsweepable by any ordinary methods. Now 
the iron bars which, uselessly (or in great degree worse 
than uselessly), enclosed this bit of ground, and made it 
pestilent, represented a quantity of work which would have 
cleansed the Carshalton pools three times over; — of work, 
partly cramped and deadly, in the mine ; partly fierce* and 

* ' A fearful occurrence took place a few days since, near "Wolverhamp- 
ton. Thomas Snape, aged nineteen, was on duty as the "keeper" of a 
blast furnace at Deepfield, assisted by John Gardner, aged eighteen, and 
Joseph Swift, aged thirty-seven. The furnace contained four tons of molten 
iron, and an equal amount of cinders, and ought to have been run out at ^-BO 
p.m. But Snape and his mates, engaged in talking and drinking, neglected 
their duty, and, in the meantime, the iron rose in the furnace until it reached 
a pipe wherein water was contained. Just as the men had stripped, and 
were proceeding to tap the furnace, the water in the pipe, converted into 
steam, burst down its front and let loose on them the molten metal, which 
instantaneously consumed Gardner ; Snape, terribly burnt, and mad with 
pain, leaped into the canal and then ran home and fell dead on the thresh- 
old , Swift survived to reach tho hospital, where he died too.' 



PREFACE. VII 

exhaustive, at the furnace ; partly foolish and sedentary, 
of ill-taught students making bad designs : work from the 
beginning to the last fruits of it, and in all the branches of 
it, venomous, deatbful, and miserable. Now, how did it 
come to pass that this work was done instead of the other; 
that the strength and life of the English operative were 
spent in defiling ground, instead of redeeming it; and in 
producing an entirely (in that place) valueless piece of 
metal, which can neither be eaten nor breathed, instead of 
medicinal fresh air, and pure water? 

There is but one reason for it, and at present a conclusive 
one, — that the capitalist can charge per-centage on the work 
in the one case, and cannot in the other. If, having certain 
funds for supporting labour at my disposal, I pay men 
merely to keep my ground in order, my money is, in that 
function, spent once for all ; but if I pay them to dig iron 
out of my ground, and work it, and sell it, I can charge 
rent for the ground, and per-centage both on the manufac- 
ture and the sale, and make my capital profitable in these 
three bye-ways. The greater part of the profitable invest- 
ment of capital, in the present day, is in operations of this 

In further illustration of tliis matter, I beg the reader to look at the 
article on the ' Decay of the English Race,' in the 'Pall-Mall Gazette" 1 of 
April 11, of this year; and at the articles on the 'Report of the Thames 
Commission,' in any journals of the same date. 



Vlll PREFACE. 

kind, in which the public is persuaded to buy something 
of no use to it, on production, or sale, of which, the capital- 
ist may charge per-centage ; the said public remaining all 
the while under the persuasion that the percentages thus 
obtained are real national gains, whereas, they are merely 
filchings out of partially light pockets, to swell heavy 
ones. 

Thus, the Croydon publican buys the iron railing, to 
make himself more conspicuous to drunkards. The public- 
house-keeper on the other side of the way presently buys 
another railing, to out-rail him with. Both are, as to their 
relative attractiveness to customers of taste, just where they 
were before ; but they have lost the price of the railings ; 
which they must either themselves finally lose, or make 
their aforesaid customers of taste pay, by raising the price 
of their beer, or adulterating it. Either the publicans, or 
their customers, are thus poorer by precisely what the 
capitalist has gained; and the value of the work itself, 
meantime, has been lost to the nation ; the iron bars in 
that form and place being wholly useless. It is this mode 
of taxation of the poor by the rich which is referred to in 
the text (page 31), in comparing the modern acquisitive 
power of capital with that of the lance and sword ; the 
only difference being that the levy of black mail in old 
times was by force, and is now by cozening. The old 



PREFACE. IX 

rider and reiver frankly quartered himself on the publican . 
for the night ; the modern one merely makes his lance into 
an iron spike, and persuades his host to buy it. One 
comes as an open robber, the other as a cheating pedlar; 
but the result, to the injured person's pocket, is absolutely 
the same. Of course many useful industries mingle with, 
and disguise the useless ones; and in the habits of energy 
aroused by the struggle, there is a certain direct good. It 
is far better to spend four thousand pounds in making a 
good gun, and then to blow it to pieces, than to pass life 
in idleness. Only do not let it be called 'political economy.' 
There is also a confused notion in the minds of many per- 
sons, that the gathering of the property of the poor into 
the hands of the rich does no ultimate harm ; since, in 
whosesoever hands it may be, it must be spent at last, and 
thus, they think, return to the poor again. This fallacy 
has been again and again exposed ; but grant the plea true, 
and the same apology may, of course, be made for black 
mail, or any other form of robbery. It might be (though 
practically it never is) as advantageous for the nation that 
the robber should have the spending of the money he ex- 
torts, as that the person robbed should have spent it. But 
this is no excuse for the theft. If I were to put a turnpike 
on the road where it passes my own gate, and endeavour 
to exact a shilling from every passenger, the public would 



PEEFACE. 



soon do away with my gate, without listening to any jlea 
on my part that ' it was as advantageous to them, in the 
end, that I should spend their shillings, as that tbey them- 
selves should.' But if, instead of out-facing them with a 
turnpike, I can only persuade them to come in and buy 
stones, or old iron, or any other useless thing, out of my 
ground, I may rob them to the same extent, and be, more- 
over, thanked as a public benefactor, and promoter of com 
mercial prosperity. And this main question for the poor 
of England — for the poor of all countries — is wholly 
omitted in every common treatise on the subject of wealth. 
Even by the labourers themselves, the operation of capital 
is regarded only in its effect on their immediate interests ; 
never in the far more terrific power of its appointment of 
the kind and the object of labour. It matters little, ulti- 
mately, how much a labourer is paid for making anything; 
but it matters fearfully what the thing is, which he is com- 
pelled to make. If his labour is so ordered as to produce 
food, and fresh air, and fresh water, no matter that his 
wages are low ; — the food and fresh air and water will be 
at last there; and he will at last get them. But if he is 
paid to destroy food and fresh air, or to produce iron bars 
instead of them, — the food and air will finally not be there, 
and he will not get them, to his great and final incon- 
venience. So that, conclusively, in political as in house- 



PKEFACE. 



hold economy, the great question is, not so much what 
money you have in your pocket, as what you will buj* 
with it, and do with it. 

I have been long accustomed, as all men engaged in 
work of investigation mast be, to hear my statements 
laughed at for years, before they are examined or believed ; 
and I am generally content to wait the public's time. But 
it has not been without displeased surprise that I have 
found myself totally unable, as yet, by any repetition, or 
illustration, to force this plain thought into my readers' 
heads, — that the wealth of nations, as of men, consists in 
substance, not in ciphers ; and that the real good of all 
work, and of all commerce, depends on the final worth of 
the thing you make, or get by it. This is a practical 
enough statement, one would think : but the English 
public has been so possessed by its modern school of eco- 
nomists with the notion that Business is always good, 
whether it be busy in mischief or in benefit ; and that 
buying and selling are always salutary, whatever the 
intrinsic worth of what you buy or sell, — that it seems 
impossible to gain so much as a patient hearing for any 
inquiry respecting the substantial result of our eager 
modern labours. I have never felt more checked by the 
sense of this impossibility than in arranging the heads of 
the following three lectures, which, though delivered at con- 



XI 1 PREFACE. 

siderable intervals of time, and in different places, were 
not prepared without reference to each other. Their con.' 
nection would, however, have been made far more distinct, 
if I had not been prevented, by what I feel to be another 
great difficulty in addressing English audiences, from enforc- 
ing, with any decision, the common, and to me the most im- 
portant, part of their subjects. I chiefly desired (as I have 
just said) to question my hearers — operatives, merchants, 
and soldiers, as to the ultimate meaning of the business they 
had in hand ; and to know from them what they expected 
or intended their manufacture to come to, their selling to 
come to, and their killing to come to. That appeared the 
first point needing determination before I could speak to 
them with any real utility or effect. 'You craftsmen — sales- 
men — swordsmen, — do but tell me clearly what you want , 
then, if I can say anything to help you, I will ; and if not, I 
will account to you as I best may for my inability.' But 
in order to put this question into any terms, one had first 
of all to face the difficulty just spoken of — to me for the 
present insuperable, — the difficulty of knowing whether to 
address one's audience as believing, or not believing, iu 
any other world than this. For if you address any average 
modern English company as believing in an Eternal life, 
and endeavour to draw any conclusions, from this assumed 
belief, as to their present business, they will forthwith tel] 



PREFACE. X11J 



you that what you say is very "beautiful, but it is not 
practical. If, on the contrary, you frankly address them 
as unbelievers in Eternal life, and try to draw any con- 
sequences from that unbelief, — they immediately hold you 
for an accursed person, and shake off the dust from their 
feet at you. And the more I thought over what I had got 
to say, the less I found I could say it, without some refer- 
ence to this intangible or intractable part of the subject. 
Jt made all the difference, in asserting any principle of war, 
whether one assumed that a discharge of artillery would 
merely knead down a certain quantity of red clay into a 
level line, as in a brick field ; or whether, out of every 
separately Christian-named portion of the ruinous heap, 
there went out, into the smoke and dead-fallen air of battle, 
some astonished condition of soul, unwillingly released. 
It made all the difference, in speaking of the possible range 
of commerce, whether one assumed that all bargains re- 
lated only to visible property — or whether property, for 
the present invisible, but nevertheless real, was elsewhere 
purchaseable on other terms. It made all the difference, 
in addressing a body of men subject to considerable hard- 
ship, and having to find some way out of it — whether one 
could confidently say to them, 'My friends, — you have 
only to die, and all will be right;' or whether one had any 
secret misgiving that such advice was more blessed to him 



XLV PREFACE. 

that gave, than to him that took it. And therefore the 
deliberate reader will find, throughout these lectures, a 
hesitation in driving points home, and a pausing short of 
conclusions which he will feel I would fain have come to; 
hesitation which arises wholly from this uncertainty of my 
hearers' temper. For I do nut now speak, nor have I evei 
spoken, since the time of first forward youth, in any prose 
lyting temper, as desiring to persuade any one of what, in 
such matters, I thought myself; but, whomsoever I ven- 
ture to address, I take for the time his creed as I find it; 
and endeavour to push it into such vital fruit as it seems 
capable of. Thus, it is a creed with a great part of the 
existing English people, that they are in possession of a 
book whieh tells them, straight from the lips of God all 
they ought to do, and need to know. I have read that 
Look, with as mueh care as most of them, for some forty 
years; and am thankful that, on those who trust it, I can 
press its pleadings. My endeavour has been uniformly to 
make them trust it more deeply than they do ; trust it, 
not in their own favourite verses only, but in the sum of 
all; trust it not as a fetish or talisman, whieh they are to 
be saved by daily repetitions of; but as a Captain's order, 
to be heard and obeyed at their peril. I was always en- 
couraged by supposing my hearers to hold such belief. To 
these, if to any, I once had hope of addressing, with ac- 



PREFACE. XV 



ceptance, words which insisted on the guilt of pride, and 
the futility of avarice; from these, if from any, i once ex- 
pected ratification of a political economy, which asserted 
that the life was more than the meat, and the body than 
raiment; and these, it once seemed to me, I might ask, 
without accusation of fanaticism, not merely in doctrine of 
the lips, but in the bestowal of their heart's treasure, to 
separate themselves from the crowd of whom it is written, 
' After all these things do the Grentiles seek. 1 

It cannot, however, be assumed, with any semblance of 
reason, that a general audience is now wholly, or even in 
majority, composed of these religious persons. A large 
portion must always consist of men who admit no such 
creed; or who, at least, are inaccessible to appeals founded 
on it. And as, with the so-called Christian, I desired to 
plead \'<»- honest declaration and fulfilment of his belief in 
life,—- with the so-called Infidel, I desired to plead for an 
honest declaration and fulfilment of his belief in death. 
The dilemma is inevitable. Men must either hereafter 
live, or hereafter die; fate may be bravely met, and con- 
duct wisely ordered, on either expectation; but never in 
hesitation between ungrasped hope, and unconfronted fear. 
We usually believe in immortality, so far as to avoid pre- 
paration for death; and in mortality, so far as to avoid pre- 
paration for anything after death. Whereas, a wist; man will 



XY1 PREFACE. 

at least hold himself prepared for one or other of two events, 
of which one or other is inevitable ; and will have all things 
in order, for his sleep, or in readiness, for his awakening. 

ISTor have we any right to call it an ignoble judgment, 
if he determine to put them in order, as for sleep. A brave 
belief in life is indeed an enviable state of mind, but, as 
far as I can discern, an unusual one. I know few Chris- 
tians so convinced of the splendour of the rooms in their 
Father's house, as to be happier when their friends are 
called to those mansions, than they would have been if 
the Queen had sent for them to live at court: nor has 
the Church's most ardent ' desire to depart, and be with 
Christ,' ever cured it of the singular habit of putting on 
mourning for every person summoned to such departure. 
On the contrary, a brave belief in death has been assu- 
redly held by many not ignoble persons, and it is a sign 
of the last depravity in the Church itself, when it assumes 
that such a belief is inconsistent with either purity of 
character, or energy of hand. The shortness of life is 
not, to any rational person, a conclusive reason for wasting 
the space of it which may be granted him ; nor does the 
anticipation of death to-morrow suggest, to any one but a 
drunkard, the expediency of drunkenness to-day. To 
teach that there is no device in the grave, may indeed 
make the deviceless person more contented in his dullness ; 



PREFACE. XVII 

but it will make the deviser only more earnest in devising : 
nor is human conduct likely, in every case, to be purer, 
under the conviction that all its evil may in a moment be 
pardoned, and all its wrong-doing in a moment redeemed ; 
and that the sigh of repentance, which purges the guilt 
of the past, will waft the soul into a felicity which forgets 
its pain, — than it may be under the sterner, and to many 
not unwise minds, more probable, apprehension, that 
1 what a man soweth that shall he also reap' — or others 
reap, — when he, the living seed of pestilence, walketh no 
more in darkness, but lies down therein. 

But to men whose feebleness of sight, or bitterness of 
soul, or the offence given by the conduct of those who 
claim higher hope, may have rendered this painful creed 
the only possible one, there is an appeal to be made, more 
secure in its ground than any which can be addressed to 
happier persons. I would fain, if I might offencelessly, 
have spoken to them as if none others heard ; and have 
said thus :' Hear me, you dying men, who will soon be 
deaf for ever. For these others, at your right hand and 
your left, who look forward to a state of infinite existence, 
in which all their errors will be overruled, and all their 
faults forgiven ; for these, who, stained and blackened in 
the battle smoke of mortality, have but to dip themselves 
for an instant in the font of death, and to rise renewed of 



XV 111 PREFACE. 

plumage, as a dove that is covered with silver, and her 
feathers like gold; for these, indeed, it may be permissible 
to waste their numbered moments, through faith in a 
future of innumerable hours ; to these, in their weakness, 
it may be conceded that they should tamper with sin 
which can only bring forth fruit of righteousness, and 
profit by the iniquity which, one day, will be remembered 
no more. In them, it may be no sign of hardness of 
heart to neglect the poor, over whom they know their 
Master is watching; and to leave those to perish tem- 
porarily, who cannot perish eternally. But, for you, 
there is no such hope, and therefore no such excuse. This 
fate, which you ordain for the wretched, you believe to be 
all their inheritance ; you may crush them, before the 
moth, and they will never rise to rebuke you ; — their 
breath, which fails for lack of food, once expiring, will 
never be recalled to whisper against you a word of accus- 
ing; — they and you, as you think, shall lie down together 
in the dust, and the worms cover you ; — and for them 
there shall be no consolation, and on you no vengeance, — 
only the question murmured above your grave: 'Who 
shall repay him what he hath done ? ' Is it therefore 
easier for you in your heart to inflict the sorrow for which 
there is no remedy ? Will you take, wantonly, this little 
all of his life from your poor brother, and make his brief 



PREFACE. XIX 

hours long to "him with pain? Will you be readier to 

the injustice which can never be redressed ; and niggardly of 

mercy which you can bestow but once, and which, refusing, 

you refuse for ever ? I think better of you, even of the 

most selfish, than that you would do this, well understood. 

And for yourselves, it seems to me, the question becomes 

not less grave, in these curt limits. If your life were but a 

fever fit, — the madness of a night, whose follies were all to 

be forgotten in the dawn, it might matter little how you 

fretted away the sickly hours, — what toys you snatched at, 

or let fall, — what visions you followed wistfully with the 

deceived eyes of sleepless phrenzy. Is the earth only an 

hospital? Play, if you care to play, on the floor of the 

hospital dens. Knit its straw into what crowns please you ; 

gather the dust of it for treasure, and die rich in that, 

clutching at the black motes in the air with your dying 

hands; — and yet, it may be well with you. But if this life 

be no dream, and the world no hospital ; if all the peace and 

power and joy you can ever win, must be won now ; and 

all fruit of victory gathered here, or never ; — will you still, 

throughout the puny totality of your life, weary yourselves 

in the fire for vanity ? If there is no rest which remain- 

eth for you, is there none you might presently take? was 

this grass of the earth made green for your shroud only, 

not for your bed? and can you never lie down upon it, but 



XX PREFACE. 

only under it ? The heathen, to whose creed you have 
returned, thought not so. They knew that life brought its 
contest, but they expected from it also the crown of all 
contest: No proud one! no jewelled circlet flaming 
through Heaven above the height of the unmerited throne; 
only some few leaves of wild olive, cool to the tired brow, 
through a few years of peace. It should have been of 
gold, they thought ; but Jupiter was poor ; this was the 
best the god could give them. Seeking a greater than 
this, they had known it a mockery. Not in war, not in 
wealth, not in tyranny, was there any happiness to be 
found for them — only in kindly peace, fruitful and free. 
The wreath was to be of wild olive, mark you : — the tree 
that grows carelessly, tufting the rocks with no vivid bloom, 
no verdure of branch ; only with soft snow of blossom, 
and scarcely fulfilled fruit, mixed with grey leaf and thorn- 
set stem ; no fastening of diadem for you but with such 
sharp embroidery ! But this, such as it is, you may win 
while yet you live; type of grey honour and sweet rest.* 
Free-heartedness, and graciousness, and undisturbed trust, 
and requited love, and the sight of the peace of others, and 
the ministry to their pain ; — these, and the blue sky above 
you, and the sweet waters and flowers of the earth beneath ; 

* pehiToeaoa, dWXov y' IvtKtv, 



PREFACE. XX] 



and mysteries and presences, innumerable, of living things, 
— these may yet be here your riches; untormenting and 
divine: serviceable for the life that now is; nor, it may 
be, without promise of that which is to come. 



CONTENTS. 



-o- 



LECTURE I. 

PAGH 

Work 3 



LECTURE II. 
Traffio 47 

LECTURE III. 
Was 83 



WORK. 






ESTABU' 



LECTURE I. 

WORK. 

(Delivered before the Working Men's Institute, at Camberwell.) 

My Friends, — I have not come among you to-night to 
endeavour to give you an entertaining lecture; but to tell you 
a few plain facts, and ask you some plain, but necessary 
questions. T have seen and known too much of the strug 
for life among our labouring population, to feel at ease, oven 
under any circumstances, in inviting them to dwell on the 
trivialities of my own studies; but, much more, as I meet to- 
night, for the first time, the members of a working Institute 
established in the district in winch 1 have passed the greater 
part of my life, I am desirous that we should at once under- 
stand each other, on graver matters. I would fain tell you, 
with what feelings, and with what hope, I regard this Insti- 
tution, as one of many such, now happily established throuj 
out England, as well as in other countries; — Institutioi 
which are preparing the way for a great change in all the 
circumstances of* industrial life; but of* which the succ 
must wholly depend upon our clearly understanding the cir- 



4 TOE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

cumstances and necessary limits of tins change. No teacher 
can truly promote the cause of education, until he knows the 
conditions of the life for which that education is to prepare 
his pupil. And the fact that he is called upon to address 
you, nominally, as a ' Working Class,' must compel him, if 
he is in any wise earnest or thoughtful, to enquire in the out- 
set, on what you yourselves suppose this class distinction has 
been founded in the past, and must be founded in the future. 
The manner of the amusement, and the matter of the teach- 
ing, w T hich any of us can offer you, must depend wholly on 
our first understanding from you, .whether you think the 
distinction heretofore drawn between working men and 
others, is truly or falsely founded. Do you accept it as it 
stands? do you wish it to be modified? or do you think the 
object of education is to efface it, and make us forget it for 
ever ? 

Let me make myself more distinctly understood. We call 
this — you and I — a 'Working Men's' Institute, and our col- 
lege in London, a 'Working Men's' College. Now, how do 
you consider that these several institutes differ, or ought to 
differ, from 'idle men's' institutes and 'idle men's' colleges? 
Or by what other word than 'idle' shall I distinguish those 
whom the happiest and wisest of working men do not object 
to call the 'Upper Classes?' Are there really upper 
classes^ — are there lower? How much should they always 



WOEK. 5 

be elevated, bow much always depressed? And, gentlemen 
and ladies — I pray those of you who are here to forgive me 
the offence there may be in what I am going to say. It is 
not I who wish to say it. Bitter voices say it ; voices of 
battle and of famine through all the world, which must be 
heard some day, whoever keeps silence. Neither is it to you 
specially that I say it. I am. sure that most now present 
know their duties of kindness, and fulfil them, better perhaps 
than I do mine. But I speak to you as representing your 
whole class, which errs, I know, chiefly by thoughtlessness, 
but not therefore the less terribly. Wilful error is limited 
by the will, but what limit is there to that of which we are 
unconscious ? 

Bear with me, therefore, while I turn to these workmen, 
and ask them, also as representing a great multitude, what 
they think the 'upper classes' are, and ought to be, in rela- 
tion to them. Answer, you workmen who are here, as you 
would among yourselves, frankly; and tell me how you 
would have me call those classes. Am I to call them — would 
you think me right in calling them — the idle classes ? I 
think you would feel somewhat uneasy, and as if I were not 
treating my subject honestly, or speaking from my heart, if 1 
went on under the supposition that all rich people were idle. 
You would be both unjust and unwise if you allowed me to 
say that; — not less unjust than the rich people who say that 



C THE CE0WN OF WILD OLIVE. 

all the poor are idle, and will never work if they can nelp it, 
or more than they can help. 

For indeed the fact is, that there are idle poor and idle 
rich ; and there are busy poor and busy rich. Many a beggar 
is as lazy as if he had ten thousand a year ; and many a man 
of large fortune is busier than his errand-boy, and never 
would think of stopping in the street to play marbles. So 
that, in a large view, the distinction between workers and 
idlers, as between knaves and honest men, runs through the 
very heart and innermost economies of men of all ranks and 
in all positions. There is a working class — strong and 
happy — among both rich and poor ; there is an idle class — ■ 
weak, wicked, and miserable — among both rich and poor. 
And the worst of the misunderstandings arising between the 
two orders come of the unlucky fact that the wise of one 
class habitually contemplate the foolish of the other. If the 
busy rich people watched and rebuked the idle rich people, 
all would be right ; and if the busy poor people watched and 
rebuked the idle poor people, all would be right. But each 
class has a tendency to look for the faults of the other. A 
hard-working man of property is particularly offended by an 
idle beggar ; and an orderly, but poor, workman is naturally 
intolerant of the licentious luxury of the rich. And what is 
severe judgment in the minds of the just men of either class, 
becomes fierce enmity in the unjust — but among the unjust 



WOKK. 1 

only. None but the dissolute among the poor look upon the 
rich as their natural enemies, or desire to pillage their houses 
and divide their property. None but the dissolute among 
the rich speak in opprobrious terms of the vices and follies 
of the poor. 

There is, then, no class distinction between idle and indus- 
trious people ; and I am going to-night to speak only of the 
industrious. The idle people we will put out of our thoughts 
at once — they are mere nuisances — what ought to be done 
with them, we'll talk of at another time. But there are class 
distinctions among the industrious themselves; — tremendous 
distinctions, which rise and fall to every degree in the infinite 
thermometer of human pain and of human power — distinc- 
tions of high and low, of lost and won, to the whole reach of 
man's soul and body. 

These separations we will study, and the laws of them, 
among energetic men only, who, whether they work 
or whether they play, put their strength into the 
work, and their strength into the game; being in the full 
sense of the word 'industrious,' one way or another — ■ 
with a purpose, or without. And these distinctions are 
mainly four: 

I. Between those who work, and those who play. 

II. Between those who produce the means of life, and 
those who consume them. 



8 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

III. Between those who work with the head, and those 
who work with the hand. 

IV. Between those who work wisely, and who work fool- 
ishly. 

For easier memory, let ns say we are going to oppose, in 
our examination, — 

I. Work to play ; 
II. Production to consumption ; 

III. Head to hand ; and, 

IV. Sense to nonsense. 

I. First, then, of the distinction between the classes who 
work and the classes who play. Of course we must agree 
upon a definition of' these terms, — work and play, — before 
going farther. Now, roughly, not with vain subtlety of defi- 
nition, but for plain use of the words, ' play ' is an exertion 
of body or mind, made to please ourselves, and with no 
determined end ; and work is a thing done because it 
ought to be done, and with a determined end. Vou play, as 
you call it, at cricket, for instance. That is as hard work as 
anything else ; but it amuses you, and it has no result but 
the amusement. If it were done as an ordered form of exer- 
cise, for health's sake, it would become work directly. So, 
in like manner, whatever we do to please ourselves, and only 
for the sake of the pleasure, not for an ultimate object, is c play,' 
the ' pleasing thing,' not the useful thing. Play may be useful 



WORK. 9 

in a secondary sense (nothing is indeed more useful or neces- 
sary) ; but the use of it depends on its being spontaneous. 

Let us, then, enquire together what sort of games the play- 
ing class in England spend their lives in playing at. 

The first of all English games is making money. That is 
an all-absorbing game; and we knock each other down often- 
er in playing at that than at foot-ball, or any other roughest 
sport; and it is absolutely without purpose; no one who en- 
gages heartily in that game ever knows why. Ask a great 
money-maker what he wants to do with his money — he never 
knows. He doesn't make it to do anything with it. He gets 
it only that he may get it. ' What will you make of what 
you have got?' you ask. 'Well, I'll get more,' he says. 
Just as, at cricket, you get more runs. There's no use in 
the runs, but to get more of them than other people is 
the game. And there's no use in the money, but to have 
more of it than other people is the game. So all that great 
foul city of London there, — rattling, growling, smoking, 
stinking, — a ghastly heap of fermenting brickwork, pouring 
out poison at every pore, — you fancy it is a city of work ? 
Not a street of it ! It is a great city of play ; very 
nasty play, and very hard play, but still play. It is only 
Lord's cricket ground without the turf, — a huge billiard table 
without the cloth, and with pockets as deep as the bottomless 

pit; but mainly a billiard table, after all. 

1* 



10 THE CROWjS" OF WILD OLIVE. 

Wei], the first great English game is this playing at coun- 
ters. It differs from the rest in that it appears always to be 
producing money, while every other game is expensive. But 
it does not always produce money. There's a great differ- 
ence between 'winning' money and 'making' it; a great 
difference between getting it out of another man's pocket 
into ours, or filling both. Collecting money is by no means 
the same thing as making it ; the tax-gatherer's house is 
not the Mint ; and much of the apparent gain (so called), 
in commerce, is only a form of taxation on carriage or 
exchange. 

Our next great English game, however, hunting and shoot- 
ing, is costly altogether; and how much we are fined for it 
annually in land, horses, gamekeepers, and game laws, and all 
else that accompanies that beautiful and special English 
game, I will not endeavour to count now : but note only that, 
except for exercise, this is not merely a useless game, but a 
deadly one, to all connected with it. For through horse- 
racing, you get every form of what the higher classes every- 
where call 'Play,' in distinction from all other plays; that 
is — gambling ; by no means a beneficial or recreative game : 
and, through game-preserving, you get also some curious lay- 
ing out of ground ; that beautiful arrangement of dwelling- 
house for man and beast, by which we have grouse and black- 
cock — so many brace to the acre, and men and women — so 



WOKK. n 

many brace to the garret. I often wonder what the angelic 
builders and surveyors — the angelic builders who build the 
'many mansions' up above there ; and the angelic surveyors, 
who measured that four-square city with their measuring 
reeds — I wonder what they think, or are supposed to think, 
of the laying out of ground by this nation, which has set it- 
self, as it seems, literally to accomplish, word for word, or 
rather fact for word, in the persons of those poor whom its 
Master left to represent him, what that Master said of him- 
self — that foxes and birds had homes, but He none. 

Then, next to the gentlemen's game of hunting, Ave must 
put the ladies' game of dressing. It is not the cheapest of 
games. I saw a brooch at a jeweller's in Bond Street a fort- 
night ago, not an inch wide, and without any singular jewel 
in it, yet worth 3,000/. And I wish I could tell you what this 
'play' costs, altogether, in England, France, and Russia an- 
nually. But it is a pretty game, and on certain terms, I like 
it; nay, I don't see it played quite as much as I would fain 
have it. You ladies like to lead the fashion : — by all means 
lead it — lead it thoroughly, lead it far enough. Dress your- 
selves nicely, and dress everybody else nicely. Lead the 
fashions for the poor first ; make them look well, and you 
yourselves will look, in ways of which you have now no con 
ception, all the better. The fashions you have set for some 
time among your peasantry are not pretty ones ; their doub- 



12 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

lets are too irregularly slashed, and the wind blows too 
frankly through them. 

Then there are other games, wild enough, as I could show 
you if I had time. 

There's playing at literature, and playing at art — very dif 
ferent, both, from working at literature, or working at art, 
but I've no time to speak of these. I pass to the greatest of 
all — the play of plays, the great gentlemen's game, which 
ladies like them best to play at, — the game of War. It is 
entrancingly pleasant to the imagination; the facts of it, not 
always so pleasant. We dress for it, however, more finely 
than for any other sport ; and go out to it, not merely in 
scarlet, as to hunt, but in scarlet and gold, and all manner of 
fine colours : of course we could fight better in grey, and 
without feathers; but all nations have agreed that it is good 
to be well dressed at this play. Then the bats and balls are 
very costly ; our English and French bats, with the balls and 
wickets, even those which we don't make any use of, costing, 
I suppose, now about fifteen millions of money annually to 
each nation ; all of which you know is paid for by hard labour- 
er's work in the furrow and furnace. A costly game ! — not 
to speak of its consequences; I will say at present nothing of 
these. The mere immediate cost of all these plays is what I 
want you to consider ; they all cost deadly work somewhere, 
as many of us know too well. The jewel-cutter, whose sight 



WOEK. 13 

fails over the diamonds ; the weaver, whose arm fails ovei 
the web ; the iron-forger, whose breath fails before the fur- 
nace — they know what work is — they, who have all the work, 
and none of the play, except a kind they have named for 
themselves down in the black north country, where 'play' 
means being laid up by sickness. It is a pretty exan^le for 
philologists, of varying dialect, this change in the sense of the 
word 'play,' as used in the black country of Birmingham, and 
the red and black country of Baden Baden. Yes, gentlemen, 
and gentlewomen, of England, who think 'one moment un- 
amused a misery, not made for feeble man,' this is what you 
have brought the word 'play ' to mean, in the heart of merry 
England ! You may have your fluting and piping ; but there 
are sad children sitting in the market-place, who indeed can- 
not say to yon, ' We have piped unto you, and ye have not 
danced : ' but eternally shall say to you, ' We have mourned 
unto you, and ye have not lamented.' 

This, then, is the first distinction between the 'upper and 
lower' classes. And this is one which is by no means neces- 
sary ; which indeed must, in process of good time, be by all 
honest men's consent abolished. Men will be taught that an 
existence of play, sustained by the blood of other creatures, 
is a good existence for gnats and sucking fish ; but not for 
men : that neither days, nor lives, can be made holy by doing 
nothing in them : that the best prayer at the beginning of a 



14 THE CEOWX OF WILD OLIYE. 

day is that we may not lose its moments ; and the best grace 
before meat, the consciousness that we have justly earned our 
dinner. And when we have this much of plain Christianity 
preached to us again, and enough respect what we regard as 
inspiration, as not to think that ' Son, go work to-day in my 
vineyard,' means ' Fool, go play to-day in my vineyard,' we 
shall all be workers, in one way or another; and this much at 
least of the distinction between ' upper ' and ' lower ' forgotten- 

II. I pass then to our second distinction ; between the 
rich and poor, between Dives and Lazarus, — distinction 
which exists more sternly, I suppose, in this day, than ever 
in the world, Pagan or Christian, till now. I will put it 
sharply before you, to begin with, merely by reading two 
paragraphs which I cut from two papers that lay on my 
breakfast table on the same morning, the 25th of Xovember, 
1884. The piece about the rich Russian at Paris is common- 
place enough, and stupid besides (for fifteen francs, — 
12s. 6<£, — -Is nothing for a rich man to give for a couple of 
peaches, out of season). Still, the two paragraphs printed 
on the same day are w^orth putting side by side. 

'Such a man is now here. He is a Russian, and, with 
your permission, we will call him Count Teufelskine. In 
dress he is sublime ; art is considered in that toilet, the har- 
mony of colour respected, the chiar 1 oscuro evident in well- 
selected contrast. In manners he is dignified — nay, perhaps 



WOEK. 15 

apathetic ; nothing disturbs the placid serenity of that calm 
exterior. One day our friend breakfasted ehez Bignon. 

When the bill came he read, "Two peaches, 15f." He paid. 
"Peaches scarce, I presume ?'' was his sole remark. "Xo, 
sir," replied the waiter, "but Teufelskines are."' Tele- 
graph, November 25, 1804. 

' Yesterday morning, at eight o'clock, a woman, passing 
a dung heap in the stone yard near the recently-erected 
almshouses in Shadwell Gap, High Street, Shadwell, called 
the attention of a Thames police-constable to a man in a sit- 
ting position on the dung heap, and said she was afraid he 
was dead. Her fears proved to be true. The wretched 
creature appeared to have been dead several hours. He 
had perished of cold and wet, and the rain had been beating 
down on him all night. The deceased was a bone-picker. 
He was in the lowest stage of poverty, poorly clad, and 
half-starved. The police had frequently driven him away 
from the stone yard, between sunset and sunrise, and told 
him to go home. He selected a most desolate spot for his 
wretched death. A penny and some bones were found in 
his pockets. The deceased was between fifty and sixty years 
of age. Inspector Roberts, of the K division, has given 
directions for inquiries to be made at the lodging-houses res- 
pecting the deceased, to ascertain his identity if possible.'— 
Morning Post, November 25, 1864. 



16 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

You have the separation thus in brief compass ; and I want 
you to take notice of the 'a penny and some bones were 
found in his pockets,' and to compare it with this third, state- 
ment, from the Telegraph of January 16th of this year : — 

' Again, the dietary scale for adult and juvenile paupers 
"Was drawn up by the most conspicuous political economists 
in England. It is low in quantity, but it is sufficient to sup- 
port nature ; yet within ten years of the passing of the Poor 
Law Act, we heard of the paupers in the Andover Union 
gnawing the scraps of putrid flesh and sucking the marrow 
from the bones of horses which they were employed to 
crush.' 

You see my reason for thinking that our Lazarus of Chris- 
tianity has some advantage over the Jewish one. Jewish 
Lazarus expected, or at least prayed, to be fed. with crumbs 
from the rich man's table ; but ' our Lazarus is fed with 
crumbs from the dog's table. 

Now this distinction between rich and poor rests on two 
bases. Within its proper limits, on a basis which is lawful 
and everlastingly necessary ; beyond them, on a basis unlaw- 
ful, and everlastingly corrupting the frame-work of society. 
The lawful basis of wealth is, that a man who works should be 
paid the fair value of his work ; and that if he does not choose 
to spend it to-day, he should have free leave to keep it, and 
spend it to-morrow. Thus, an industrious man working 



WORK. 1 7 

daily, and laying by daily, attains at last the possession of'ar. 
accumulated sum of wealth, to which he has absolute right. 
The idle poison who will not work, and the wasteful person 
who lays nothing by, at the end of the same time will be dou- 
bly poor — poor in possession, and dissolute in moral habit; 
and he will then naturally eovot the money which the other 
has saved. And if lie is then allowed to attaek the other, 
and rob him of his well-earned wealth, there is no more 
any motive for saving, or any reward for good conduct; 
and ;ill society is thereupon dissolved, or exists only in sys- 
tems of rapine. Therefore the first necessity of social life 
is the clearness of national conscience in enforcing the 
Jaw — that lie should keep who has justly earned. 

That law, I say, is the proper basis of distinction between 
rioli and pool". But there is also a false basis of distinc- 
tion ; namely, the power held over those who earn wealth 
by those who levy or exact it. There will be always a num- 
ber of men who would fain sot themselves to the accumu- 
lation of wealth as the sole object of their lives. Neces- 
sarily, that class of men is an uneducated class, inferior in 
intellect, and more or less cowardly. It is physically 
impossible for a well-educated, intellectual, or brave man 
to make money the chief object of his thoughts; as physi- 
cally impossible as it is for him to make his dinner the 
principal object of them. All healthy people like their 



13 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

dinners, but their dinner is not the main object of their 
lives. So all healthily minded people like making moi..ey — 
ought to like it, and to enjoy the sensation of winning it; 
but the main object of their life is not money ; it is some- 
thing better than money. A good soldier, for instance, 
mainly wishes to do his fighting well. He is glad of his 
pay — very properly so, and justly grumbles when you 
keep him ten years without it — still, his main notion of life 
is to win battles, not to be paid for winning them. So 
of clergymen. They like pew-rents, and baptismal fees, 
of course ; but yet, if they are brave and well educated, 
the pew-rent is not the sole object of their lives, and the 
baptismal fee is not the sole purpose of the baptism ; the 
clergyman's object is essentially to baptize and preach, not 
to be paid for preaching. So of doctors. They like fees 
no doubt, — ought to like them ; yet if they are brave and 
well educated, the entire object of their lives is not fees. 
They, on the whole, desire to cure the sick ; and, — if they 
are good doctors, and the choice were fairly put to 
them, — Avould rather cure their patient, and lose their fee, 
than kill him, and get it. And so with all other brave and 
rightly trained men ; their work is first, their fee second — ■ 
very important always, but still second. But in every 
nation, as I said, there are a vast class who are ill-edu- 
cated, cowardly, and more or less stupid. And with these 



WOEK. 19 

people, just as certainly the fee is first, and the work 
second, as with brave people the work is first and the fee 
second. And this is no small distinction. It is the whole 
distinction in a man ; distinction between life and death in 
him, between heaven and hell for him. You cannot serve 
two masters; — j on must serve one or other. If your work 
is first with you, and your fee second, work is your master, 
and the lord of work, who is God. But if your fee is 
first with you, and your work second, fee is your master, 
and the lord of fee, who is the Devil ; and not only the 
Devil, but the lowest of devils — the ' least erected fiend 
that fell.' So there you have it in brief terms ; Work 
first — you are God's servants ; Fee first — you are the 
Fiend's. And it makes a difference, now and ever, believe 
me, whether you serve Him who has on His vesture and 
thigh written, ' King of Kings,' and whose service is per- 
fect freedom ; or him on whose vesture and thigh the 
name is written, ' Slave of Slaves,' and whose service is 
perfect slavery. 

However, in every nation there are, and must always be 
a certain number of these Fiend's servants, who have it 
principally for the object of their lives to make money. 
They are always, as I said, more or less stupid, and can 
not conceive of anything else so nice as money. Stupidity 
is always the basis of the Judas bargain. We do great 



20 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

injustice to Iscariot, in thinking him wicked above all com- 
mon wickedness. He was only a common money-lover, 
and, like all money-lovers, didn't understand Christ ; — 
couldn't make out the worth of Him, or meaning of Him. 
He didn't want Him to be killed. He was horror-struck 
when he found that Christ would "be killed ; threw his 
money away instantly, and hanged himself. How many of 
our present money-seekers, think you, would have the grace 
to hang themselves, whoever was killed? But Judas was 
a common, selfish, muddle-headed, pilfering fellow ; his 
hand always in the bag of the poor, not caring for them 
He didn't understand Christ; — yet believed in Him, much 
more than most of us do ; had seen Him do miracles, 
thought He was quite strong enough to shift for Himself, 
and he, Judas, might as well make his own little bye-per- 
quisites out of the affair. Christ would come out of it 
well enough, and he have his thirty pieces. IsTow, that is 
the money-seeker's idea, all over the world. He doesn't 
hate Christ, but can't understand Him — doesn't care for 
Him — sees no good in that benevolent business ; makes his 
own little job out of it at all events, come what will. And 
thus, out of every mass of men, you have a certain num- 
ber of bag-men — your 'fee first' men, whose main object is 
to make money. And they do make it — make it in all 
sorts of unfair ways, chiefly by the weight and force of 



WORK, 21 

money itself, or what is called the power of capital ; that is 
to say, the power which money, once obtained, has over the 
labour of the poor, so that the capitalist can take all its 
produce to himself, except the labourer's food. That is the 
modern Judas's way of 'carrying the bag,' and 'bearing 
what is put therein.' 

Nay, but (it is asked) how is that an unfair advantage ? 
Has not the man who has worked for the money a right to 
use it as he best can ? No ; in this respect, money is now 
exactly what mountain promontories over public roads were 
in old times. The barons fought for them fairly : — the strong- 
est and cunningest got them ; then fortined them, and made 
everyone who passed below pay toll. Well, capital now is 
exactly what crags w r ere then. Men fight fairly (we will, at 
least, grant so much, though it is more than we ought) for 
their money ; but, once having got it, the fortined millionaire 
can make everybody who passes below pay toll to his million, 
and build another tower of his money castle. And I can tell 
you, the poor vagrants by the roadside suffer now quite as 
much from the bag-baron, as ever they did from the crag- 
baron. Bags and crags have just the same result on rags. I 
have not time, however, to-night to show you in how many 
ways the power of capital is unjust ; but this one great prin- 
ciple I have to assert — you will find it quite indisputably true 
— that whenever money is the principal object of life with 



22 THE CEOWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

either man or nation, it is both got ill, and spent ill ; and does 
harm both in the getting and spending ; but when it is not 
the principal object, it and all other things will be well got, 
and well spent. And here is the test, with every man, of 
whether money is the principal object with him, or not. If 
in mid-life he could pause and say, " JSTow I have enough to 
live upon, I'll live upon it ; and having well earned it, I will 
also well spend it, and go out of the world poor, as I came 
into it," then money is not principal with him; but if, having 
enough to live upon in the manner befitting his character and 
rank, he still wants to make more, and to die rich, then money 
is the principal object with him, and it becomes a curse to 
himself, and generally to those who spend it after him. For 
you know it must be spent some day ; the only question is 
whether the man who makes it shall spend it, or some one 
else. And generally it is better for the maker to spend it, 
for he will know best its value and use. This is the true law 
of life. And if a man does not choose thus to spend his 
money, he must either hoard it or lend it, and the worst thing 
he can generally do is to lend it; for borrowers are nearly 
always ill-spenders, and it is with lent money that all evil is 
mainly done, and all unjust war protracted. 

For observe what the real fact is, respecting loans to for- 
eign military governments, and how strange it is. If your 
little boy came to you to ask for money to spend in squibs 



WORK. 23 

and crackers, you would think twice before you gave it him ; 
and you would have some idea that it was wasted, when you 
saw it fly off in fireworks, even though he did no mischief 
with it. But the Russian children, and Austrian children, 
come to you, borrowing money, not to spend in innocent 
squibs, but in cartridges and bayonets to attack you in India 
with, and to keep down all noble life in Italy with, and to 
murder Polish women and children with; and that you will 
give at once, because they pay you interest for it. Now, in 
order to pay you that interest, they must tax every working 
peasant in their dominions; and on that work you live. You 
therefore at once rob the Austrian peasant, assassinate or 
banish the Polish peasant, and you live on the produce of the 
theft, and the bribe for the assassination ! That is the broad 
fact — that is the practical meaning of your foreign loans, and 
of most large interest of money ; and then you quarrel with 
Bishop Colenso, forsooth, as if he denied the Bible, and you 
believed it ! though, wretches as you are, every deliberate 
act of your lives is a new defiance of its primary orders ; and 
as if, for most of the rich men of England at this moment, it 
were not indeed to be desired, as the best thing at least for 
them, that the Bible should not be true, since against them 
these words are written in it: c The rust of your gold and 
silver shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flush, 
as it were fire.' 



24 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

III. I pass now to our third condition of separation, be* 
tween the men who work with the hand, and those who work 
with the head. 

And here we have at last an inevitable distinction. There 
must be work done by the arms, or none of us could live. 
There must be work done by the brains, or the life we get 
would not be worth having. And the same men cannot do 
both. There is rough work to be done, and rough men must 
do it ; there is gentle work to be done, and gentlemen 
must do it; and it is physically impossible that one class should 
do, or divide, the work of the other. And it is of no use to 
try to conceal this sorrowful fact by fine words, and to talk 
to the workman about the honourableness of manual labour, 
and the dignity of humanity. That is a grand old proverb 
of Sancho Panza's, c Fine words butter no parsnips ; ' and I 
can tell you that, all over England just now, you workmen 
are buying a great deal too much butter at that dairy. Rough 
work, honourable or not, takes the life out of us ; and the man 
who has been heaving clay out of a ditch all day, or driving 
an express train against the north wind all night, or holding 
a collier's helm in a gale on a lee-shore, or whirling white hot 
iron at a furnace mouth, that man is not the same at the end 
of his day, or night, as one who has been sitting in a quiet 
room, with everything comfortable about him, reading books, 
or classing butterflies, or painting pictures. If it is any com* 



WORK. 25 

fort to you to be told that the rough work is the more honour- 
able of the two, I should be sorry to take that much of con- 
solation from you; and in some sense I need not. The rough 
work is at all events real, honest, and, generally, though not 
always, useful ; while the fine work is, a great deal of it, 
foolish and false as well as fine, and therefore dishonourable : 
but when both kinds are equally well and worthily done, the 
head's is the noble work, and the hand's the ignoble ; and of 
nil hand work whatsoever, necessary for the maintenance of 
life, those old words, c In the sweat of thy face thou shalt eat 
bread,' indicate that the inherent nature of it is one of cala- 
mity ; and that the ground, cursed for our sake, casts also 
some shadow of degradation into our contest with its thorn 
and its thistle ; so that all nations have held their days hon- 
ourable, or ' holy,' and constituted them ' holydays ' or 
4 holidays,' by making them clays of rest ; and the promise, 
which, among all our distant hopes, seems to cast the chief 
brightness over death, is that blessing of the dead who die in 
the Lord, that 'they rest from their labours, and their 
works do follow them.' 

And thus the perpetual question and contest must arise, 
who is to do this rough work ? and how is the worker of it 
to be comforted, redeemed, and rewarded ? and what kind 
of play should he have, and what rest, in this world, some- 
times, as well as in the next ? Well, my good working 



26 THE CEOWN OF WILD OLIYE. 

friends, these questions will take a little time to answer yet. 
They must be answered : all good men are occupied with 
them, and all honest thinkers. There's grand head work 
doing about them ; but much must be discovered, and much 
attempted in vain, before anything decisive can be told 
you. Only note these few particulars, which are already 
sure. 

As to the distribution of the hard work. None of us, or 
very few of us, do either hard or soft work because we think 
we ought ; but because we have chanced to fall into the way 
of it, and cannot help ourselves. Now, nobody does any- 
thing well that they cannot help doing : work is only done 
well when it is done with a will; and no man has a tho- 
roughly sound will unless he knows he is doing what he 
should, and is in his place. And, depend upon it, all work 
must be done at last, not in a disorderly, scrambling, doggish 
way, but in an ordered, soldierly, human way — a lawful 
way. Men are enlisted for the labour that kills — the labour 
of war : they are counted, trained, fed, dressed, and praised for 
that. Let them be enlisted also for the labour that feeds : let 
them be counted, trained, fed, dressed, praised for that. 
Teach the plough exercise as carefully as you do the sword 
exercise, and let the officers of troops of life be held as much 
gentlemen as the officers of troops of death ; and all is done : 
but neither this, nor any other right thing, can be accom- 



WORK. 27 

plished — you can't even see your way to it — unless, first of 
all, both servant and master are resolved that, come what 
will of it, they will do each other justice. People are per- 
petually squabbling about what will be best to do, or easiest 
to do, or adviseablest to do, or profitablest to do ; but they 
never, so far as I hear them talk, ever ask what it is just to 
do. And it is the law of heaven that you shall not be able to 
judge what is wise or easy, unless you are first resolved to 
judge what is just, and to do it. That is the one thing con- 
stantly reiterated by our Master — the order of all others that 
is given often est — 'Do justice and judgment.' That's your 
Bible order ; that's the ' Service of God,' not praying nor 
psalm-singing. You are told, indeed, to sing psalms when 
you are merry, and to pray when you need anything ; and, 
by the perversion of the Evil Spirit, we get to think that 
praying and psalm-singing are 'service.' If a child finds 
itself in want of anything, it runs in and asks its father for it 
— does it call that, doing its father a service? If it begs for 
a toy or a piece of cake — does it call that serving its father ? 
That, with God, is prayer, and lie likes to hear it : He likes 
yon to ask Him for cake when you want it; but lie does n't 
call that 'serving Him.' Begging is not serving: God likes 
mere beggars as little as you do — He likes honest servants, 
not beggars. So when a child loves its father very much, 
and is very happy, it may sing little songs about him; but it 



28 THE CK0WN OF WILD OLIVE. 

doesn't call that serving its father; neither is singing songs 
about God, serving God. It is enjoying ourselves, if it's any- 
thing ; most probably it is nothing ; but if it's anything, it is 
serving ourselves, not God. And yet we are impudent 
enough to call our beggings and chauntings 'Divine Ser- 
vice : ' we say ' Divine service will be " performed " ' (that's 
our word — the form of it gone through) 'at eleven o'clock.' 
Alas ! — unless we perform Divine service in every willing act 
of our life, we never perform it at all. The one Divine 
work — the one ordered sacrifice — is to do justice; and it is 
the last we are ever inclined to do. Anything rather than 
that ! As much charity as you choose, but no justice. 
'ISTay/you will say, ' charity is greater than justice.' Yes, 
it is greater; it is the summit of justice — it is the temple of 
which justice is the foundation. But you can't have the top 
without the bottom ; you cannot build upon charity. You 
must build upon justice, for this main reason, that you have 
not, at first, charity to build with. It is the last reward of 
good work. Do justice to your brother (you can do that, 
whether you love him or not), and you will come to love 
him. But do injustice to him, because you don't love him ; 
and you will come to hate him. It is all very fine to think 
you can build upon charity to begin with ; but you will find 
all you have got to begin with, begins at home, and is essenti- 
ally love of yourself. You well-to-do people, for instance, who 



WORK. 29 

are here to-night, will go to * Divine service ' next Sunday, 
all nice and tidy, and your little children will have their tight 
little Sunday hoots on, and lovely little Sunday feathers in 
their hats; and you'll think, complacently and piously, how 
lovely they look ! So they do : and you love them heartily, 
and you like sticking feathers in their hats. That 's all right : 
that is charity ; but it is charity beginning at home. Then 
you will come to the poor little crossing-sweeper, got up 
also, — it, in its Sunday dress, — the dirtiest rags it has, — that 
it may beg the better: we shall give it a penny, and think 
how good we are. That 's charity going abroad. But what 
does Justice say, walking and watching near us ? Christian 
Justice has been strangely mute, and seemingly blind ; and, 
if not blind, decrepit, this many a day: she keeps her ac- 
counts still, however — quite steadily — doing them at nights, 
carefully, with her bandage off, and through acutest specta- 
cles (the only modern scientific invention she cares about). 
You must put your ear down ever so close to her lips to hear 
her speak ; and then you will start at what she first whispers, 
for it will certainly be, 'Why shouldn't that little crossing- 
sweeper have a feather on its head, as well as your own 
child ?' Then you may ask Justice, in an amazed manner, 
i How she can possibly be so foolish as to think children 
could sweep crossings with feathers on their heads?' Then 
you stoop again, and Justice says — still in her dull, stupid 



30 THE CEOWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

way — c Then, why don't you, every other Sunday, leave your 
child to sweep the crossing, and take the little sweeper to 
church in a hat and feather ? ' Mercy on us (you think), 
what will she say next ? And you answer, of course, that 
1 you don't, because every body ought to remain content in 
the position in which Providence has placed them.' Ah, my 
friends, that 's the gist of the whole question. Did Provi- 
dence put them in that position, or did you? You knock a 
man into a ditch, and then you tell him to remain content in 
the ' position in which Providence has placed him.' That's 
modern Christianity. You say — c We did not knock him 
into the ditch.' How do you know what you have done, or 
are doing? That's just what we have all got to know, and 
what we shall never know, until the question with us every 
morning, is, not how to do the gainful thing, but how to do 
the just thing ; nor until we are at least so far on the way to 
being Christian, as to have understood that maxim of the 
poor half-way Mahometan, l One hour in the execution of 
justice is worth seventy years of prayer.' 

Supposing, then, we have it determined with appropriate 
justice, who is to do the hand work, the next questions must 
be how the hand-workers are to be paid, and how they are 
to be refreshed, and what play they are to have. Now, the 
possible quantity of play depends on the j)Ossible quantity of 
pay ; and the quantity of pay is not a matter for conside- 



WORK. 3 1 

ration to hand-workers only, but to all workers. Generally, 
good, useful work, whether of the hand or head, is either 
ill-paid, or not paid at all. I don't say it should be so, but 
it always is so. People, as a rule, only pay for being amused 
or being cheated, not for being served. Five thousand a 
year to your talker, and a shilling a day to your fighter, 
digger, and thinker, is the rule. None of the best head 
work in art, literature, or science, is ever paid for. How 
much do you think Homer got for his Iliad ? or Dante for his 
Paradise? only bitter bread and salt, and going up and down 
other people's stairs. In science, the man who discovered 
the telescope, and first saw heaven, was paid with a dun- 
geon ; the man who invented the microscope, and first saw 
earth, died of starvation, driven from his home: it is indeed 
very clear that God means all thoroughly good work and 
talk to be done for nothing. Baruch, the scribe, did not 
get a penny a line for writing Jeremiah's second roll for him, 
I fancy ; and St. Stephen did not get bishop's pay for that 
long sermon of his to the Pharisees ; nothing but stones. 
For indeed that is the world-father's proper payment. So 
surely as any of the world's children work for the world's' 
good, honestly, with head and heart ; and come to it, saying, 
' Give us a little bread, just to keep the life in us,' the world- 
father answers them, ' No, my children, not bread ; a stone, 
if you like., or as many as you need, to keep you quiet.' But 



32 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE, 

the hand-workers are not so ill off as all this comes to. The 
worst that can happen to you is to break stones ; not he 
broken by them. And for you there will come a time for 
better payment ; some day, assuredly, more pence will be 
paid to Peter the Fisherman, and few^er to Peter the Pope ; 
we shall pay people not quite so much for talking in Parlia- 
ment and doing nothing, as for holding their tongues out 
of it and doing something; we shall pay our ploughman a 
little more and our lawyer a little less, and so on : but, at 
least, we may even now take care that whatever work is 
done shall be fully paid for ; and the man who does it paid 
for it, not somebody else ; and that it shall be done in an 
orderly, soldierly, well-guided, wholesome way, under good 
captains and lieutenants of labour ; and that it shall have its 
appointed times of rest, and enough of them; and that in 
those times the play shall be wholesome play, not in theatri- 
cal gardens, with tin flowers and gas sunshine, and girls 
dancing because of their misery ; but in true gardens, with 
real flowers, and real sunshine, and children dancing because 
of their gladness; so that truly the streets shall be full (the 
'streets,' mind you, not the gutters) of children, playing in 
the midst thereof. We may take care that working-men 
shall have at least as good books to read as anybody else, 
when they've time to read them; and as comfortable firesides 
to sit at as anybody else, when they've time to sit at them. 



WORK. 33 

This, I think, can be managed for you, my working friends, 
in the good time. 

IY. I must go on, however, to our last head, concerning 
ourselves ail, as workers. What is wise work, and what is 
foolish work ? What the difference between sense and non 
sense, in daily occupation ? 

Well, wise work is, briefly, work with God. Foolish work 
is work against God. And work done with God, which He 
will help, may be briefly described as 'Putting in Order- — ■ 
that is, enforcing God's law of order, spiritual and material, 
over men and things. The first thing you have to do, essen- 
tially; the real 'good work' is, with respect to men, to 
enforce justice, and with respect to things, to enforce tidi- 
ness, and fruitful ne>s. And against these two great human 
deeds, justice and order, there are perpetually two great 
demons contending, — the devil of iniquity, or inequity, and 
the devil of disorder, or of death ; for death is only consum- 
mation of disorder. You have to tight these two fiends daily. 
So far as you don't fitrht against the fiend of iniquitv, you 
work for him. You ' work iniquity," and the judgment upon 
you, for all your ' Lord, Lord's,' will be ' Depart from me, 
ye that work iniquity.' And so fir as you do not resist the 
fiend of disorder, you work disorder, and you yourself do 
the work of Death, which is sin, and has for its wa.2'es, Death 

himself. 

2* 



34 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

Observe then, all wise work is mainly threefold in charac 
ter. It is honest, useful, and cheerful. 

I. It is honest. I hardly know anything more strange 
than that you recognise honesty in play, and you do not in 
work. In your lightest games, you have always some one 
to see what you call 'fair-play. 5 In boxing, you must hit 
fair ; in racing, start fair. Your English watchword is fair- 
play, your English hatred, foul-play. Did it ever strike you 
that you wanted another watchword also, fair-work, and 
another hatred also, foul-work ? Your prize-fighter lias 
some honour in him yet ; and so have the men in the ring 
round him: they will judge him to lose the match, by foul 
hitting. But your prize-merchant gains his match by foul 
selling, and no one cries out against that. You drive a 
gambler out of the gambling-room who loads dice, but you 
leave a tradesman in nourishing business, who loads scales! 
For observe, all dishonest dealino- is loading scales. What 
does it matter whether I get short weight, adulterate sub- 
stance, or dishonest fabric? The fault in the fabric is incom- 
parably the worst of the two. Give me short measure of 
food, and I only lose by you ; but give me adulterate food, 
and I die by you. Here, then, is your chief duty, you work- 
men and tradesmen — to be true to yourselves, and to us who 
would help you. We can do nothing for you, nor you for 
yourselves, without honesty. Get that, you get all ; with- 



WORK. 35 

out that, your suffrages, your reforms, your free-trade mea- 
sures, your institutions of science, are all in vain. It is use- 
less to put your heads together, if you can't put your heart? 
together. Shoulder to shoulder, right hand to right hand, 
among yourselves, and no wrong hand to anybody else, and 
you'll win the world yet. 

II. Then, secondly, wise work is useful. No man minds, 
or ought to mind, its being hard, if only it comes to some- 
thing ; but when it is hard, and comes to nothing ; when all 
our bees' business turns to spiders' ; and for honey-comb we 
have only resultant cobweb, blown away by the next breeze 
— that is the cruel thing for the worker. Yet do we ever 
ask ourselves, personally, or even nationally, whether our 
work is coming to anything or not ? We don't care to keep 
what has been nobly done ; still less do we care to do nobly 
what others would keep ; and, least of all, to make the work 
itself useful instead of deadly to the doer, so as to use his 
life id leed, but not to waste it. Of all wastes, the greatest 
wastp that you can commit is the waste of labour. If you 
went down in the morning into your dairy, and you found 
that your youngest child had got down before you ; and 
that he and the cat were at play together, and that he had 
poured out all the cream on the floor for the cat to lap up, 
you would scold the child, and be sorry the milk was wasted. 
But if, instead of wooden bowls with milk in them, there 



30 the croavjst or wild olive. 

are golden bowls with human life in them, and instead of 
the cat to play with — the devil to play with ; and you your- 
self the player ; and instead of leaving that golden bowl to 
be broken by God at the fountain, you break it in the dust 
yourself, and pour the human blood out on the ground for 
'the fiend to lick up — that is no waste! What! you perhaps 
think, ' to waste the labour of men is not to kill them.' Is it 
not ? I should like to know how you could kill them more 
utterly — kill them with second deaths, seventh deaths, hun- 
dredfold deaths ? It is the slightest way of killing to stop 
a man's breath. Nay, the hunger, and the cold, and the 
little whistling bullets — our love-messengers between nation 
and nation — have brought pleasant messages from us to 
many a man before now ; orders of sweet release, and leave 
at last to go where he will be most welcome and most 
happy.- At the worst you do but shorten his life, you- do 
not corrupt his life. But if you put him to base labour, if 
you bind his thoughts, if you blind his eyes, if you blunt his 
hopes, if you steal his joys, if you stunt his body, and blast 
his soul, and at last leave him not so much as to reap the 
poor fruit of his degradation, but gather that for yourself, 
and dismiss him to the grave, when you have done with him, 
having, so fir as in you lay, made the walls of that grave 
everlasting (though, indeed, I fancy the goodly bricks of 
some of our family vaults will hold closer in the resurrection 



WOEK. 37 

day than the sod over the labourer's head), this you think is 
no waste, and no sin ! 

III. Then, lastly, wise work is cheerful, as a child's work 
is. And now I want you to take one thought home with 
you, and let it stay with you. 

Everybody in this room has been taught to pray daily, 
'Thy kingdom come.' N"ow T , if we hear a man swear in the 
streets, we think it very wrong, and say he 'takes God's 
name in vain.' But there 's a twenty times worse way of 
taking His name in vain, than that. It is to ask God for 
what ice donH want. He does n't like that sort of prayer. If 
you don't want a thing, don't ask for it : such asking is the 
worst mockery of your King you can mock Him with ; the 
soldiers striking Him on the head with the reed was nothing 
to that. If you do not wish for His kingdom, don't pray for 
it. But if you do, you must do more than pray for it ; you 
must work for it. And, to work for it, you must know what 
it is : we have all prayed for it many a day without thinking. 
Observe, it is a kingdom that is to come to us ; we are not 
to go to it. Also, it is not to be a kingdom of the dead, but 
of the living. Also, it is not to come all at once, but quietly ; 
nobody knows how. 'The kingdom of God cometh not with 
observation.' Also, it is not to come outside of us, but in 
the hearts of us: 'the kingdom of God is within you.' And, 
being within us, it is not a thing to be seen, but to be felt; 



38 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

and though it brings all substance of good with it, it does 
not consist in that: 'the kino-dom of God is not meat and 
drink, but righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost:' 
joy, that is to say, in the holy, healthful, and helpful Spirit. 
Now, if we want to work for this kingdom, and to bring 
it, and enter into it, there 's just one condition to be first 
accepted. You must enter it as children, or not at all; 
4 Whosoever will not receive it as a little child shall not enter 
therein.' And again, ' Suffer little children to come unto 
me, and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of 
heaven.' 

Of such, observe. Not of children themselves, but of such 
as children. I believe most mothers who read that text 
think that all heaven is to be full of babies. But that's not 
so. There will be children there, but the hoary head is the 
crown. ' Length of days, and long life and peace,' that is 
the blessing, not to die in babyhood. Children die but for 
their parents' sins ; God means them to live, but He can't let 
them always ; then they have their earlier place in heaven : 
and the little child of David, vainly prayed for; — the little 
child of Jeroboam, killed by its mother's step on its own 
threshold, — they will be there. But weary old David, and 
weary old Barzillai, having learned children's lessons at last, 
will be there too . and the one question for us all, young or 
old, is, have we learned our child's lesson ? it is the character of 



WORK. 39 

cDiIdicn we want, and must gain at our peril ; let us see, 
briefly, in what it consists. 

The first character of right childhood is that it is Modest 
A well-bred child does not think it can teach its parents, of 
that it knows everything. It may think its father and 
mother know everything, — perhaps that all grown-up people 
know everything ; very certainly it is sure that it does not. 
And it is always asking questions, and wanting to know 
more. Well, that is the first character of a good and wise 
man at his work. To know that he knows very little ; — to 
perceive that there are many above him wiser than he ; and 
to be always asking questions, wanting to learn, not to teach. 
No one ever teaches well who wants to teach, or governs 
well who wants to govern ; it is an old saying (Plato's, 
but I know not if his, first), and as wise as old. 

Then, the second character of right childhood is to be 
Faithful. Perceiving that its father knows best what is good 
for it, and having found always, when it has tried its own 
way against his, that he was right and it was wrong, a noble 
child trusts him at last wholly, gives him its hand, and will 
walk blindfold with him, if he bids it. And that is the true 
character of all good men also, as obedient workers, or sol- 
diers under captains. They must trust their captains ; — they 
are bound for their lives to choose none but those whom they 
can trust. Then, they are not always to be thinking that 



40 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

what seems strange to them, or wrong in what they are 
desired to do, is strange or wrong. They know their cap- 
tain : where he leads they must follow, what he bids, they 
must do ; and without this trust and faith, without this 
captainship and soldiership, no great deed, no great salvation, 
is possible to man. Among all the nations it is only when 
this faith is attained by them that they become great : the 
Jew, the Greek, and the Mahometan, agree at least in testify- 
ing to this. It was a deed of this absolute trust which made 
Abraham the father of the faithful ; it was the declaration of 
the power of God as captain over all men, and the acceptance 
of a leader appointed by Him as commander of the faithful, 
which laid the foundation of whatever national power yet 
exists in the East; and the deed of the Greeks, which has 
become the type of unselfish and noble soldiership to all 
lands, and to all times, was commemorated, on the tomb of 
those who gave their lives to do it, in the most pathetic, so 
far as I know, or can feel, of all human utterances: 'Oh, 
stranger, go and tell our people that we are lying here, 

having obeyed their words.' 

V 

Then the third character of right childhood is to be Loving 

and Generous. Give a little love to a child, and you get a 

great deal back. It loves everything near it, when it is a 

right kind of child — would hurt nothing, would give the best 

it has away, always, if you need it — does not lay plans for 



WORK. 41 

getting everything in the house for itself, and delights in 
helping people ; you cannot please it so much as by giving it 
a chance of being useful, in ever so little a way. / 

And because of all these characters, lastly, it is Cheerful. 
Putting its trust in its father, it is careful for nothing — being 
full of love to every creature, it is happy always, whether in 
its play or in its duty. Well, that's the great worker's cha- 
racter also. Taking no thought for the morrow; taking 
thought only for the duty of the day ; trusting somebody else 
to take care of to-morrow ; knowing indeed what labour is, but 
not what sorrow is; and always ready for play — beautiful 
play, — for lovely human play is like the play of the Sun. 
There's a worker for you. He, steady to his time, is set as a 
strong man to run his course, but also, he rcjoiceth as a strong 
man to run his course. See how he plays in the morning, 
with the mists below, and the clouds above, with a ray here 
and a flash there, and a shower of jewels everywhere ; — that's 
the Sun's play; and great human play is like his — all various 
— all full of light and life, and tender, as the dew of the 
morning. 

So then, you have the child's character in these four things — 
Humility, Faith, Charity, and Cheerfulness. That's what you 
have got to be converted to. ' Except ye be converted and be- 
come as little children ' — You hear much of conversion now- 
a-days ; but people always seem to think they have got to be 



42 THE GROWN OF WILD OLIYE. 

made wretched by conversion, — to be converted to long 
faces. No, friends, you have got to be converted to short 
ones; you have to repent into childhood, to repent into 
delight, and delightsomeness. You can't go into a con- 
venticle but you'll hear plenty of talk of backsliding. 
Backsliding, indeed! I can tell you, on the ways most 
of us go, the faster we slide back the better. Slide back 
into the cradle, if going on is into the grave — back, I 
tell you ; back — out of your long faces, and into your 
long clothes. It is among children only, and as children 
only, that you will find medicine for your healing and 
true wisdom for your teaching. There is poison in the 
counsels of the men of this world ; the words they speak 
are all bitterness, 'the poison of asps is under their lips,' 
but, ' the sucking child shall play by the hole of the 
asp.' There is death in the looks of men. ' Their eyes 
are privily set against the poor ;' they are as the uncharm- 
able serpent, the cockatrice, which slew by seeing. But 
' the weaned child shall lay his hand on the cockatrice 
den.' There is death in the steps of men: 'their feet 
are swift to shed blood; they have compassed us in 
our steps like the lion that is greedy of his prey, and 
the young lion lurking in secret places,' but, in that king- 
dom, the wolf shall lie down with the lamb, and the 
fatling with the lion, and 'a little child shall lead them. 5 



WORK. 43 

There is death in the thoughts of men: the world is 
one wide riddle to them, darker and darker as it draws 
to a close ; but the secret of it is known to the child 
and the Lord of heaven and earth is most to be thanked 
in that ' He has hidden these things from the wise and 
prudent, and has revealed them unto babes.' Yes, and there 
is death — infinitude of death in the principalities and 
powers of men. As far as the east is from the west, 
so far our sins are — not set from us, but multiplied around 
us: the Sun himself, think you he now 'rejoices' to run 
his course, when he plunges westward to the horizon, so 
widely red, not witli clouds, but blood ? And it will be 
red more widely yet. Whatever drought of the early 
and latter rain may be, there will be none of that red 
rain. You fortify yourselves, you arm yourselves, against 
it in vain ; the enemy and avenger will be upon you also, 
unless you learn that it is not out of the mouths of the 
knitted gun, or the smoothed rifle, but ' out of the 
mouths of babes and sucklings ' that the strength is ordain- 
ed, which shall ' still the enemy and avenger.' 



TRAFFIC. 



LECTURE II. 

TRAFFIC. 

{Delivered in the Town Hall, Bradford.) 

My good Yorkshire friends, you asked me down here 
among your hills that I might talk to you about this 
Exchange you are going to build : but earnestly and seriously 
asking you to pardon me, I am going to do nothing of 
the kind. I cannot talk, or at least can say very little, 
about this same Exchange. I must talk of quite other 
things, though not willingly; — I could not deserve your 
pardon, if when you invited me to speak on one subject, 
I wilfully spoke on another. But I cannot speak, to 
purpose, of anything about which I do not care ; and most 
simply and sorrowfully I have to tell you, in the outset, that 
I do not care about this Exchange of yours. 

If, however, when you sent me your invitation, I had 
answered, ' I won't come, I don't care about the Exchange 
of Bradford,' you would have been justly offended with 
me, not knowing the reasons of so blunt a carelessness. 
So I have come down, hoping that you will patiently let 
me tell you why, on this, and many other such occasions, 



48 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

I now remain silent, when formerly I should have caught 
at the opportunity of speaking to a gracious audience. 

In a word, then, I do not care about this Exchange, — 
because you don't ; and because you know perfectly well 
I cannot make you. Look at the essential circumstances 
of the case, which you, as business men, know perfectly 
well, though perhaps you think I forget them. You are 
going to spend 30,000^, which to you, collectively, is nothing ; 
the buying a new coat is, as to the cost of it, a much 
more important matter of consideration to me than building 
a new Exchange is to you. But you think you may as 
well have the right thing for your money. You know 
there are a great many odd styles of architecture about ; 
you don't want to do anything ridiculous; you hear of 
me, among others, as a respectable architectural man-milliner : 
and you send for me, that I may tell you the leading 
fashion ; and what is, in our shops, for the moment, the 
newest and sweetest thing in pinnacles. 

ISTow, pardon me for telling you frankly, you cannot have 
good architecture merely by asking people's advice on occa- 
sion. All good architecture is the expression of national life 
and character; and it is produced by a prevalent and eager 
national taste, or desire for beauty. And I want you to think 
a little of the deep significance of this word Haste;' for no 
statement of mine has been more earnestly or oftener contro- 



TRAFFIC. 49 

verted than that good taste is essentially a moral quality. 
' No,' say many of my antagonists, 'taste is one thing, moral- 
ity is another. Tell us what is pretty ; we shall be glad to 
know that ; but preach no sermons to us.' 

Permit me, therefore, to fortify this old dogma of mine 
somewhat. Taste is not only a part and an index of moral- 
ity — it is the only morality. The first, and last, and closest 
trial question to any living creature is, ' What do you like ?' 
Tell me what you like, and I'll tell you what you are. Go 
out into the street, and ask the first man or woman you meet, 
what their ' taste ' is, and if they answer candidly, you know 
them, body and soul. ' You, my friend in the rags, with the 
unsteady gait, what do you like ?' ' A pipe and a quartern 
of gin.' I know yon. 'You, good woman, with the quick 
step and tidy bonnet, what do you like ?' ' A swept hearth 
and a c'ean tea-table, and my husband opposite me, and a 
baby at my breast.' Good, I know you also. ' You, little 
girl with the golden hair and the soft eyes, what do you like?' 
'My canary, and a run among the wood hyacinths.' 'You, 
little boy with the dirty hands and the low forehead, what do 
you like ?' ' A shy at the sparrows, and a game at pitch- 
farthing.' Good ; we know them all now. What more need 
we ask ? 

' Nay,' perhaps you answer : ' we need rather to ask what 

these people and children do, than what they like. If they do 

3 



50 THE CROWN OE WILD OLIVE. 

right, it is no matter that they like what is wrong ; and if 
they do wrong, it is no matter that they like what is right. 
Doing is the great thing ; and it does not matter that the 
man likes drinking, so that he does not drink ; nor that the 
little girl likes to be kind to her canary, if she will not learn 
her lessons ; nor that the little boy likes throwing stones at 
the sparrows, if he goes to the Sunday school.' Indeed, for a 
short time, and in a provisional sense, this is true. For if, 
resolutely, people do what is right, in time they come to like 
doing it. But they only are in a right moral state when they 
have come to like doing it ; and as long as they don't like it, 
they are still in a vicious state. The man is not in health of 
body who is always thirsting for the bottle in the cupboard, 
though he bravely bears his thirst ; but the man who heart- 
ily enjoys water in the morning and wine in the evening, each 
in its proper quantity and time. And the entire object of 
true education is to make people not merely do the right 
things, but enjoy the right things — not merely industrious, 
but to love industry — not merely learned, but to love know- 
ledge — not merely pure, but to love purity — not merely just, 
but to hunger and thirst after justice. 

But you may answer or think, ' Is the liking for outside 
ornaments, — for pictures, or statues, or furniture, or archi- 
tecture, — a moral quality ? ' Yes, most surely, if a rightly 
set liking. Taste for any pictures or statues is not a moral 



TEAFFIC. 51 

quality, but taste for good ones is. Only here again we have 
to define the word 'good.' I don't mean by 'good,' clever 
— or learned — or difficult in the doing. Take a picture by 
Terriers, of sots quarrelling over their dice : it is an entirely 
clever picture ; so clever that nothing in its kind has ever 
been done equal to it ; but it is also an entirely base and evil 
picture. It is an expression of delight in the prolonged con- 
templation of a vile thing, and delight in that is an c unman- 
nered,' or 'immoral' quality. It is 'bad taste' in the 
profoundest sense — it is the taste of the devils. On the 
other hand, a jricture of Titian's, or a Greek statue, or a 
Greek coin, or a Turner landscape, expresses delight in the 
perpetual contemplation of a good and perfect thing. That 
is an entirely moral quality — it is the taste of the angels. 
And all delight in art, and all love of it, resolve themselves 
into simple love of that which deserves love. That deserv- 
ing is the quality which we call ' loveliness ' — (we ought to 
have an opposite word, hateliness, to be said of the things 
which deserve to be hated) ; and it is not an indifferent nor 
optional thing whether we love this or that ; but it is just 
the vital function of all our being. What we like determines 
what we are^ and is the sign of what we are ; and to teach 
taste is inevitably to form character. As I was thinking 
over this, in walking up Fleet Street the other day, my eye 
caught the title of a book standing open in a bookseller's 



52 THE CROWN OP WILD OLIVE. 

window. It was — ' On the necessity of the diffusion of taste 
among all classes.' 'Ah,' I thought to myself, 'my classify- 
ing friend, when you have diffused your taste, where will 
your classes be ? The man who likes what you like, belongs 
to the same class with you, I think. Inevitably so. You 
may put him to other work if you choose ; but, by the 
condition you have brought him into, he will dislike 
the other work as much as you would yourself. You get 
hold of a scavenger, or a costermonger, who enjoyed the 
Newgate Calendar for literature, and "Pop goes the 
Weasel " for music. You think you can make him 
like Dante and Beethoven ? I wish you joy of your 
lessons; but if you do, you have made a gentleman of 
him: — he won't like to go back to his costermonger- 
ing.' 

And so completely and unexceptionally is this so, that, if 
I had time to-night, I could show you that a nation cannot be 
affected by any vice, or weakness, without expressing it, legi- 
bly, and for ever, either in bad art, or by want of art ; and 
that there is no national virtue, small or great, which is not 
manifestly expressed in all the art which circumstances en 
able the people possessing that virtue to produce. Take, for 
instance, your great English virtue of enduring and patient 
courage. You have at present in England only one art of 
any consequence — that is, iron-working. You know thoroughly 



TRAFFIC. 53 

well how to cast and hammer iron. Now, do you think in 
those masses of lava which you build volcanic cones to melt, 
and which you forge at the months of the Infernos you have 
created ; do you think, on those iron plates, your courage 
and endurance are not written for ever — not merely with an 
iron pen, but on iron parchment ? And take also your great 
English vice — European vice — vice of all the world — vice of all 
other worlds that roll or shine in heaven, bearing with them 
yet the atmosphere of hell — the vice of jealousy, which 
brings competition into your commerce, treachery into your 
councils, and dishonour into your wars — that vice which has 
rendered for you, and for your next neighbouring nation, the 
daily occupations of existence no longer possible, but with 
the mail upon your breasts and the sword loose in its sheath; 
so that, at last, you have realised for all the multitudes of the 
two great peoples who lead the so-called civilisation of the 
earth, — you have realised for them all, I say, in person and 
in policy, what was once true only of the rough Border 
riders of your Cheviot hills — 

' They carved at the meal 
With gloves of steel, 
And they drank the red wine through the helmet barr'd ; — 
do you think that this national shame and dastardlincss of 
heart are not written as legibly on every rivet of your iron 
armour as the strength of the right hands that forged it ? 



54 THE CKOWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

Friends, I know not whether this thing be the more ludicrous 
or the more melancholy. It is quite unspeakably both. 
Suppose, instead of being now sent for by you, I had been 
sent for by some private gentleman, living in a suburban 
house, with his garden separated only by a fruit-wall from his 
next door neighbour's ; and he had called me to consult with 
him on the furnishing of his drawing-room. I begin looking 
about me, and find the walls" rather bare; I think such and 
such a paper might be desirable — perhaps a little fresco here 
and there on the ceiling; — a damask curtain or so at the win- 
dows. 'Ah,' says my employer, 'damask curtains, indeed! 
That's all very fine, but you know I can't afford that kind of 
thing just now ! ' ' Yet the world credits you with a splen- 
did income ! ' ' Ah, yes,' says my friend, ' but do you know, 
at present, I am obliged to spend it nearly all in steel-traps ? ' 
' Steel-traps ! for whom ? ' ' Why, for that fellow on the 
other side the wall, you know: we're very good friends, 
capital friends ; but we are obliged to keep our traps set 
on both sides of the wall; we could not possibly keep on 
friendly terms without them, and our spring guns. The 
worst of it is, we are both clever fellows enough ; and there's 
never a day passes that we don't find out a new trap, or a 
new gun-barrel, or something; we spend about fifteen mil- 
lions a year each in our traps, take it all . together ; and I 
don't see how we 're to do with less.' A highly comic state 



TRAFFIC. 55 

of life for two private gentlemen ! but for two nations, it 
seems to me, not wholly comic ? Bedlam would be comic, 
perhaps, if there were only one madman in it; and your 
Christmas pantomime is comic, when there is only one clown 
in it; but when the whole world turns clown, and paints 
itself red with its own heart's blood instead of vermilion, it 
is something else than comic, I think. 

Mind, I know a great deal of this is play, and willingly 
allow for that. You don't know what to do with yourselves 
for a sensation : fox-hunting and cricketing will not carry you 
through the whole of this unendurably long mortal life : you 
liked pop-guns when you were schoolboys, and rirles and 
Armstrongs are only the same things better made : but then 
the worst of it is, that what was play to you when boys, was 
not play to the sparrows; and what is play to you now, is 
not play to the small birds of State neither; and for the 
black eagles, you are somewhat shy of taking shots at them, 
if I mistake not. 

I must get back to the matter in hand, howeyer. Believe 
me, without farther instance, I could show you, in all time, 
that every nation's vice, or virtue, was written in its art : tha 
soldiership of early Greece ; the sensuality of late Italy; the 
visionary religion of Tuscany ; the splendid human energy 
and beauty of Yenice. I have no time to do this to-night (I 
have done it elsewhere before now) ; but I proceed 



56 THE CROWN OF WILD OL1 V E. 

to apply the principle to ourselves in a more searching 
manner. 

I notice that among all the new buildings that cover your 

once wild hills, churches and schools are mixed in due, that 

is to say, in large proportion, with your mills and mansions 

and I notice also that the churches and schools are almost 

always Gothic, and the mansions and mills are never Gothic. 

Will you allow me to ask precisely the meaning of this? 

For, remember, it is peculiarly a modern phenomenon. 

When Gothic was invented, houses were Gothic as well as 

churches ; and when the Italian style superseded the Gothic, 

churches were Italian as well as houses. If there is a 

Gothic spire to the cathedral of Antwerp, there is a Gothic 

belfry to the Hotel de Ville at Brussels ; if Inigo Jones 

builds an Italian Whitehall, Sir Christopher Wren builds an 

Italian St. Paul's. But now you live under one school of 

architecture, and worship under another. What do you 

mean by doing this ? Am I to understand that you are 

thinking of changing your architecture back to Gothic ; and 

that you treat your churches experimentally, because it does 

not matter what mistakes you make in a church ? Or am I 

to understand that you consider Gothic a pre-eminently 

sacred and beautiful mode of building, which you think, like 

the fine frankincense, should be mixed for the tabernacle 

only, and reserved for your religious services? For if this be 



TRAFFIC. 57 

the feeling, though it may seem at first as if it were graceful 
and reverent, you will find that, at the root of the matter, it 
signifies neither more nor less than that you have separated 
your religion from your life. 

For consider what a wide significance this fact has ; and 
remember that it is not you only, but all the people of Eng- 
land, who are behaving thus just now. 

You have all got into the habit of calling the church ' the 
house of God.' I have seen, over the doors of many church- 
es, the legend actually carved, ' This is the house of God, 
and this is the gate of heaven.' Now, note where that legend 
comes from, and of what place it was first spoken. A boy 
leaves his father's house to go on a long journey on foot, to 
visit his uncle; he has to cross a wild hill-desert; just as if 
one of your own boys had to cross the wolds of Westmore- 
land, to visit an uncle at Carlisle. The second or third day 
your boy finds himself somewhere between Hawes and 
Brough, in the midst of the moors, at sunset. It is stony 
ground, and boggy ; lie cannot go one foot farther that 
night. Down he lies, to sleep, on Wharnside, where best he 
may, gathering a few of the stones together to put under his 
head; — so wild the place is, he cannot get anything but 
stones. And there, lying under the broad night, he has a 
dream; and he sees a ladder set up on the earth, and the top 
of it reaches to heaven, and the angels of God are ascending 



58 THE CEOWN OF WILD OLIVI. 

and descending upon it. And when he wakes out of hia 
sleef,he says, 'How dreadful is this place; surely, this is 
none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of 
heaven.' This place, observe; not this church; not this 
city ; not this stone, even, which he puts up for a memorial — 
the piece of flint on which his head has lain. But this 
place; this windy slope of Wharnside ; this moorland hol- 
low, torrent-bitten, snow-blighted; this any place where 
God lets down the ladder. And how are you to know where 
that will be ? or how are you to determine where it may be, 
but by being ready for it always ? Do you know where the 
lightning is to fall next? You do know that, partly; you 
can guide the lightning ; but you cannot guide the going 
forth of the Spirit, which is that lightning when it shines 
from the east to the west. 

But the perpetual and insolent warping of that strong 
verse to serve a merely ecclesiastical purpose, is only one of 
the thousand instances in which w T e sink back into gross 
Judaism. We call our churches ' temples.' Now, you 
know, or ought to know, they are not temples. They have 
never had, never can have, anything whatever to do with 
temples. They are 'synagogues' — 'gathering places' — ■ 
where you gather yourselves together as an assembly; and 
by not calling them so, you again miss the force of another 
mighty text — 'Thou, when thou prayest, shalt not be as the 



TKAFFIC. 59 

hypocrites are ; for they love to pray standing in the 
churches ' [we should translate it], ' that they may be seen of 
men. But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet. 
and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father,' — - 
which is, not in chancel nor in aisle, but ' in secret. 5 

N"ow, you feel, as I say this to you— I know you feel — as 
if I were trying to take away the honour of your churches.. 
Kot so ; I am trying to prove to you the honour of your 
houses and your hills; I am trying to show you — not that 
the Church is not sacred — but that the whole Earth is. I 
would have you feel, what careless, what constant, what infec- 
tious sin there is in all modes of thought, whereby, in calling 
your churches only ' holy,' you call your hearths and homes 
profane ; and have separated yourselves from the heathen by 
casting all your household gods to the ground, instead of 
recognising, in the place of their many and feeble Lares, the 
presence of your One and Mighty Lord and Lar. 

'But what has all this to do with our Exchange ? ' you ask 
me, impatiently. My dear friends, it has just everything to 
do with it ; on these inner and great questions depend all the 
outer and little ones ; and if you have asked me down here 
to speak to you, because you had before been interested in 
anything I have written, you must know that ail I have yet 
said about architecture was to show this. The book I called 
'The Seven Lamps' was to show that certain right states of 



GO THE CKOWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

temper and moral feeling were the magic powers by which 
all good architecture, without exception, had been produced. 
' The Stones of Venice ' had, from beginning to end, no other 
aim than to show that the Gothic architecture of Venice had 
arisen out of, and indicated in all its features, a state of pure 
national faith, and of domestic virtue ; and that its Renais- 
sance architecture had arisen out of, and in all its features in- 
dicated, a state of concealed national infidelity, and of domes- 
tic corruption. And now, you ask me what style is best to 
build in ; and how can I answer, knowing the meaning of the 
two styles, but by another question — do you mean to build 
as Christians or as Infidels ? And still more — do you mean 
to build as honest Christians or as honest Infidels? as tho- 
roughly and confessedly either one or the other? You don't 
like to be asked such rude questions. I cannot help it ; they 
are of much more importance than this Exchange business; 
and if they can be at once answered, the Exchange business 
settles itself in a moment. But, before I press them farther, I 
must ask leave to explain one point clearly. In all my past 
work, my endeavour has been to show that good architecture 
is essentially religious — the production of a faithful and vir- 
tuous, not of an infidel and corrupted people. But in the 
course of doing this, I have had also to show that good archi- 
tecture is not ecclesiastical. People are so apt to look upon 
religion as the business of the clergy, not their own, that the 



TRAFFIC. Gl 

moment they hear of anything depending on 'religion,' they 
think it must also have depended on the priesthood ; and J 
have had to take what place was to be occupied between 
these two errors, and fight both, often with seeming contra- 
diction. Good architecture is the work of good and believ- 
ing men; therefore, you say, at least some people say, 'Good 
architecture must essentially have been the work of the cler- 
gy, not of the laity.' No — a thousand times no; good archi- 
tecture has always been the work of the commonalty, not of 
the clergy. What, you say, those glorious cathedrals — the 
pride of Europe — did their builders not form Gothic archi- 
tecture? No; they corrupted Gothic architecture. Gothic 
was formed in the baron's castle, and the burgher's street. 
It was formed by the thoughts, and hands, and powers of 
free citizens and soldier kings. By th(; monk it was used as 
an instrument for the aid of his superstition ; when that su- 
perstition beeame a beautiful madness, and the best hearts of 
Europe vainly dreamed and pined in the cloister, and vainly 
raged and perished in the crusade — through that fury of per- 
verted faith and wasted war, the Gothic rose also to its love- 
liest, most fantastic, and, finally, most foolish dreams; and, 
in those dreams, was lost,. 

I hope, now, that there is no risk of your misunderstanding 
me when I come to the gist of what I want to say to-night — ■ 
when I repeat, that evei - y great national architecture has been 



62 THE CEOWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

the result and exponent of a great national religion. Yon 
can't have bits of it here, bits there — you must have it every- 
where, or nowhere. It is not the monopoly of a clerical com- 
pany — it is not the exponent of a theological dogma — it is not 
the hieroglyphic writing of an initiated priesthood ; it is the 
manly language of a people inspired by resolute and common 
purpose, and rendering resolute and common fidelity to the 
legible laws of an undoubted God. 

Now, there have as yet been three distinct schools of Eu- 
ropean architecture. I say, European, because Asiatic and 
African architectures belong so entirely to other races and 
climates, that there is no question of them here; only, in pass- 
ing, I will simply assure you that whatever is good or great 
in Egypt, and Syria, and India, is just good or great for the 
same reasons as the buildings on our side of the Bosphorus. 
We Europeans, then, have had three great religions : the 
Greek, which was the worship of the God of Wisdom and 
Power; the Mediaeval, which was the Worship of the God 
of Judgment and Consolation; the Renaissance, which was 
the worship of the God of Pride and Beauty ; these three we 
have had — they are past, — and now, at last, we English have 
got a fourth religion, and a God of our own, about which I 
want to ask you. But I must explain these three old ones 
first. 

I repeat, first, the Greeks essentially worshipped the God 



TEAFFIC. 63 

of Wisdom ; so that whatever contended against their reli- 
gion, — to the Jews a stumbling block. — was, to the Greeks — 
Foolishness. 

The first Greek idea of Deity was that expressed in the 
word, of which we keep the remnant in our words ' Z^'-urnal' 
and 'J9£-vine' — the god oiDay, Jupiter the revealer. Athena 
is his daughter, but especially daughter of the Intellect, 
springing armed from the head. We are only with the help 
of recent investigation beginning to penetrate the depth of 
meaning couched under the Athenaic symbols: but I may 
note rapidly, that her aegis, the mantle with the serpent 
fringes, in which she often, in the best statues, is represented 
as folding up her left hand for better guard, and the Gorgon 
on her shield, are both representative mainly of the chilling 
horror and sadness (turning men to stone, as it were,) of the 
outmost and superficial spheres of knowledge — that know- 
ledge which separates, in bitterness, hardness, and sorrow, 
the heart of the full-grown man from the heart of the child. 
For out of imperfect knowledge spring terror, dissension, 
danger, and disdain ; but from perfect knowledge, given by 
the full-revealed Athena, strength and peace, in sign of which 
she is crowned with the olive spray, and bears the resistless 
spear. 

This, then, was the Greek conception of purest Deity, 
and every habit of life, and every form of his art developed 



64 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

themselves from the seeking this bright, serene, resistless 
wisdom; and setting himself, as a man, to do things ever- 
more rightly and strongly ; * not with any ardent affection 
or ultimate hope; but with a resolute and continent energy 
of will, as knowing that for failure there was no consolation, 
and for sin there was no remission. And the Greek architec- 
ture rose unerring, bright, clearly defined, and self-contained. 
Next followed in Europe the great Christian faith, which 
was essentially the religion of Comfort. Its great doctrine 
is the remission of sins ; for which cause it happens, too 
often, in certain phases of Christianity, that sin and sickness 
themselves are partly glorified, as if, the more you had to be 
healed of, the more divine was the healing. The practical 
result of this doctrine, in art, is a continual contemplation 
of sin and disease, and of imaginary states of purification 
from them ; thus we have an architecture conceived in a 

* It is an error to suppose that the G-reek worship, or seeking, waa 
chiefly of Beauty. It was essentially of Rightness and Strength, founded 
on Forethought: the principal character of Greek art is not Beauty, but 
Design: and the Dorian Apollo-worship and Athenian Virgin-worship 
are both expressions of adoration of divine Wisdom and Purity. Next to 
these great deities rank, in power over the national mind, Dionysus and 
Oeres, the givers of human strength and life : then, for heroic example, 
Hercules. There is no Venus-worship among the Greeks in the great 
times : and the Muses are essentially teachers of Truth, and of its har- 
monies. 



TRAFFIC. 65 

mingled sentiment of melancholy and aspiration, partly 
severe, partly luxuriant, which will bend itself to every one 
of our needs, and every one of our fancies, and be strong or 
weak with us, as we are strong or weak ourselves. It is, of 
all architecture, the basest, when base people build it— of 
all, the noblest, when built by the noble. 

And now note that both these religions — Greek and Medi- 
aeval — perished by falsehood in their own main purpose. 
The Greek religion of Wisdom perished in a false philosophy 
— ' Oppositions of science, falsely so called.' The Media3val 
religion of Consolation perished in false comfort ; in remis- 
sion of sins given lyingly. It was the selling of absolution 
that ended the Mediaeval faith ; and I can tell you more, it is 
the selling of absolution which, to the end of time, will mark 
false Christianity. Pure Christianity gives her remission of 
sins only by ending them ; but false Christianity gets her 
remission of sins by compounding for them. And there are 
many ways of compounding for them. We English have 
beautiful little quiet ways of buying absolution, whether in low 
Church or high, far more cunning than any of Tetzel's trading. 

Then, thirdly, there followed the religion of Pleasure, in 
which all Europe gave itself to luxury, ending in death. 
First, bals masques in every saloon, and then guillotines in 
every square. And all these three worships issue in vast 
temple building. Your Greek worshipped Wisdom, and 



6Q THE CEOWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

built you the Parthenon — the Virgin's temple. The Mediae- 
val worshipped Consolation, and built you Virgin temples 
also — but to our Lady of Salvation. Then the Revivalist 
worshipped beauty, of a sort, and built you Versailles, and 
the Vatican. Now, lastly, will you tell me what we worship, 
and what we build ? 

You know we are speaking always of the real, active, con- 
tinual, national worship ; that by which men act while they 
live ; not that which they talk of when they die. Now, we 
have, indeed, a nominal religion, to which we pay tithes of 
property and sevenths of time ; but we have also a practical 
and earnest religion, to which we devote nine-tenths of our 
property and sixth-sevenths of our time. And we dispute a 
great deal about the nominal religion ; but we are all unani- 
mous about this practical one, of which I think you will admit 
that the ruling goddess may be best generally described as 
the ' Goddess of Getting-on,' or ' Britannia of the Market.' 
The Athenians had an 'Athena Agoraia,' or Minerva of the 
Market; but she was a subordinate type of their goddess, 
while our Britannia Agoraia is the principal type of ours. 
And all your great architectural works, are, of course, built 
to her. It is long since you built a great cathedral ; and how 
you would laugh at me, if I proposed building a cathedral on 
the top of one of these hills of yours, taking it for an Acro- 
polis ! But your railroad mounds, prolonged masses of Aero- 



TRAFFIC. 67 

polis ; your railroad stations, vaster than the Parthenon, and 
innumerable ; your chimneys, how much more mighty and 
costly than cathedral spires ! your harbour-piers ; your 
warehouses ; your exchanges ! — all these are built to your 
great Goddess of ' Getting-on ; ' and she has formed, and 
will continue to form, your architecture, as long as you wor- 
ship her ; and it is quite vain to ask me to tell you how to 
build to her; you know far better than I. 

There might indeed, on some theories, be a conceivably 
good architecture for Exchanges — that is to say if there were 
any heroism in the fact or deed of exchange, which might be 
typically carved on the outside of your building. For, you 
know, all beautiful architecture must be adorned with sculp- 
ture or painting; and for sculpture or painting, you must 
have a subject. And hitherto it has been a received opinion 
among the nations of the world that the only right subjects 
for either, were heroisms of some sort. Even on his pots and 
his flagons, the Greek put a Hercules slaying lions, or an 
Apollo slaying serpents, or Bacchus slaying melancholy 
giants, and earth-born despondencies. On his temples, the 
Greek put contests of great warriors in founding states, or of 
gods with evil spirits. On his houses and temples alike, the 
Christian put carvings of angels conquering devils ; or of 
hero-martyrs exchanging this world for another; subject 
inappropriate, I think, to our manner of exchange here. And 



68 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

the Master of Christians not only left his followers without 
any orders as to the sculpture of affairs of exchange on the 
outside of buildings, but gave some strong evidence of his 
dislike of affairs of exchange within them. And yet there 
might surely be a heroism in such affairs ; and all commerce 
become a kind of selling of doves, not impious. The wonder 
has always been great to me, that heroism has never been 
supposed to be in anywise consistent with the practice of 
supplying people with food, or clothes ; but rather with that 
of quartering oneself upon them for food, and stripping them 
of their clothes. Spoiling of armour is an heroic deed in all 
ages ; but the selling of clothes, old, or new, has never taken 
any colour of magnanimity. Yet one does not see why feed- 
ing the hungry and clothing the naked should ever become 
base businesses, even when engaged in on a large scale. If 
one could contrive to attach the notion of conquest to them 
anyhow ? so that, supposing there were anywhere an obsti- 
nate race, who refused to be comforted, one might take some 
pride in giving them compulsory comfort; and as it were, 
'occupying a country' with one's gifts, instead of one's 
armies ? If one could only consider it as much a victory to 
get a barren field sown, as to get an eared field stripped; and 
contend who should build villages, instead of who should 
'•carry' them. Are not all forms of heroism, conceivable in 
doing these serviceable deeds ? You doubt who is strongest ? 



TRAFFIC. 69 

It might be ascertained by push of spade, as well as push of 
sword. Who is wisest? There are witty things to bo 
thought of in planning other business than campaigns. Who 
is bravest ? There are always the elements to fight with, 
stronger than men ; and nearly as merciless. The only 
absolutely and unapproachably heroic element in the soldier's 
work seems to be — that he is paid little for it — and regularly: 
while you traffickers, and exchangers, and others occupied in 
presumably benevolent business, like to be paid much for it — ■ 
and by chance. I never can make out how it is that a 
knight-errant does not expect to be paid for his trouble, but 
a pedlar-errant always does ; — that people are willing to take 
hard kuocks for nothing, but never to sell ribands cheap ; — 
that they are ready to go on fervent crusades to recover the 
tomb of a buried God, never on any travels to fulfil the 
orders of a living God ; — that they will go anywhere barefoot 
to preach their faith, but must be well bribed to practise it, 
and are perfectly ready to give the Gospel gratis, but never 
the loaves and fishes. If you chose to take the matter up on 
any such soldierly principle, to do your commerce, and your 
feeding of nations, for fixed salaries ; and to be as particular 
about giving people the best food, and the best cloth, as 
soldiers are about giving them the best gunpowder, I could 
carve something for you on your exchange worth looking at. 
But I can only at present suggest decorating its frieze with 



70 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

pendant purses; and making its pillars broad at the base, for 
the sticking of bills. And in the innermost chambers of it 
there might be a statue of Britannia of the Market, who may 
have, perhaps advisably, a partridge for her crest, typical at 
once of her courage in lighting for noble ideas ; and of her 
interest in game; and. round its neck the inscription in golden 
letters, ' Perdix fovit quae non peperit.' * Then, for her 
spear, she might have a weaver's beam ; and on her shield, 
instead of her Cross, the Milanese boar, semi-fleeced, with 
the town of Gennesaret proper, in the field and the legend 
' In the best market,' and her corslet, of leather, folded over 
her heart in the shape of a purse, with thirty slits in it for a 
piece of money to go in at, on each day of the month. And 
I doubt not but that people would come to see your exchange, 
and its goddess, with applause. 

Nevertheless, I want to point out to you certain strange 
characters in this goddess of yours. She differs from the 
great Greek and Medieval deities essentially in two things — 
first, as to the continuance of her presumed power ; secondly, 
as to the extent of it. 

1st, as to the Continuance. 

* Jerem. xvii. 11 (best in Septuagint and Yulgate). 'As the partridge, 
Fostering what she brought not forth, so he that gettoth riches, not by 
right, shall leave them in the midst of his days, and at his end shall be a 
fooL' 



TRAFFIC. 71 

The Greek Goddess of Wisdom gave continual increase of 
wisdom, as the Christian Spirit of Comfort (or Comforter) 
continual increase of comfort. There was no question, with 
these, of any limit or cessation of function. But with yonr 
Agora Goddess, that is just the most important question. 
Getting on — but where to? Gathering together — but how 
much ? Do you mean to gather always — never to spend ? 
If so, I wish you joy of your goddess, for I am just as well 
off as you, without the trouble of worshipping her at all. 
But if you do not spend, somebody else will — somebody else 
must. And it is because of this (among many other such 
errors) that I have fearlessly declared your so-called science 
of Political Economy to be no science ; because, namely, it 
has omitted the study of exactly the most important branch 
of the business — the study of spending. For spend you 
must, and as much as you make, ultimately. You gather 
corn : — will you bury England under a heap of grain ; or 
will you, when you have gathered, finally eat ? You gather 
gold : — will you make your house-roofs of it, or pave your 
streets with it ? That is still one way of spending it. But 
if you keep it, that you may get more, I'll give you more ; 
I'll give you all the gold you want — all you can imagine — * 
if you can tell me what you '11 do with it. You shall have 
thousands of gold pieces ; — thousands of thousands — millions 
— mountains, of gold : where will you keep them ? Will 



72 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

you put an Olympus of silver upon a golden Pelion — make 
Ossa like a wart ? Do you think the rain and dew would 
then come down to you, in the streams from such mountains, 
more blessedly than they will down the mountains which 
God has made for you, of moss and whinstone? But it is 
not gold that you want to gather ! What is it ? green- 
backs ? No ; not those neither. What is it then — is it 
ciphers after a capital I ? Cannot you practise writing 
ciphers, and write as many as you want? Write ciphers for 
an hour every morning, in a big book, and say every even- 
ing, I am worth all those noughts more than I was yester- 
day. Won't that do? Well, what in the name of Plutus is 
it you want? Not gold, not greenbacks, not ciphers after a 
capital I ? You will have to answer, after all, ' No ; we 
want, somehow or other, money's worth.'' Well, what is 
that ? Let your Goddess of Getting-on discover it, and let 
her learn to stay therein. 

II, But there is yet another question to be asked respect- 
ing this Goddess of Getting-on. The first was of the con- 
tinuance of her power ; the second is of its extent. 

Pallas and the Madonna were supposed to be all the 
world's Pallas, and all the world's Madonna. They could 
teach all men, and they could comfort all men. But, look 
strictly into the nature of the power of your Goddess of 
Getting-on ; and you will find she is the Goddess — not of 



TRAFFIC. ^3 

everybody's getting on — but only of somebody's getting on. 
This is a vital, or rather deathful, distinction. Examine it in 
your own ideal of the state of national life which this God- 
dess is to evoke and maintain. I asked yon what it was, 
when I was last here;* — you have never told me. Now, 
shall I try to tell you ? 

Your ideal of human life then is, I think, that it should bo 
passed in a pleasant undulating world, with iron and coal 
everywhere underneath it. On each pleasant bank of this 
world is to be a beautiful mansion, with two wings; and 
stables, and coach-houses; a moderately sized park; a large 
garden and hot-houses ; and pleasant carriage drives through 
the shrubberies. In this mansion are to live the favoured 
votaries of the Goddess ; the English gentleman, with his 
gracious wife, and his beautiful family; always able to have 
the boudoir and the jewels for the wife, and the beautiful 
ball dresses for the daughters, and hunters for the sons, and 
a shooting in the Highlands for himself. At the bottom of 
the bank, is to be the mill ; not less than a quarter of a mile 
long, with a steam engine at each end, and two in the mid- 
dle, and a chimney three hundred feet high. In this mill are 
to be in constant employment from eight hundred to a thou 
sand workers, who never drink, never strike, always go to 

* Two Paths, p. 98 
4 



74 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

church on Sunday, and always express themselves in respect 
ful language. 

Is not that, broadly, and in the main features, the kind of 
thing you propose to yourselves ? It is very pretty indeed 
seen from above ; not at all so pretty, seen from below. 
For, observe, while to one family this deity is indeed the 
Goddess of Getting on, to a thousand families she is the 
Goddess of not Getting on. ' Nay,' you say, ' they have all 
their chance.'' Yes, so has every one in a lottery, but there 
must always be the same number of blanks. 'Ah! but in 
a lottery it is not skill and intelligence which take the lead, 
but blind chance.' What then ! do you think the old 
practice*, that 'they should take who have the power, and 
they should keep who can,' is less iniquitous, when the 
power has become power of brains instead of fist? and 
that, though we may not take advantage of a child's or a 
woman's weakness, we may of a man's foolishness ? l Nay, 
but finally, work must be done, and some one must be at the 
top, some one at the bottom.' Granted, my friends. Work 
must always be, and captains of work must always be ; and 
if you in the least remember the tone of any of my writings, 
you must know that they are thought unfit for this age, 
because they are always insisting on need of government, 
and speaking with scorn of liberty. But I beg you to 
observe that there is a wide difference between being 



TRAFFIC!. 75 

captains or governors of work, and taking the profits of it. 
It does not follow, because you are general of an army, that 
you are to take all the treasure, or land, it wins (if it fight 
for treasure or land) ; neither, because you are king of a 
nation, that you are to consume all the profits of the nation's 
work. Real kings, on the contrary, are known invariably 
by their doing quite the reverse of this, — by their taking 
the least possible quantity of the nation's work for themselves. 
There is no test of real kinghood so infallible as that. Does 
the crowned creature live simply, bravely, unostentatiously ? 
probably he is a King. Does he cover his body with jewels, 
and his table with delicates ? in all probability he is not a 
King. It is possible he may be, as Solomon was ; but that is 
when the nation shares his splendour with him. Solomon 
made gold, not only to be in his own palace as stones, but to 
be in Jerusalem as stones. But even so, for the most part, 
these splendid kinglioods expire in ruin, and only the true 
kinghoods live, which are of royal labourers governing 
loyal labourers ; who, both leading rough lives, establish 
the true dynasties. Conclusively you will find that because 
you are king of a nation, it does not follow that you are 
to gather for yourself all the wealth of that nation ; neither, 
because you are king of a small part of the nation, 
and lord over the means of its maintenance — over field, or 
mill, or mine, are you to take all the produce of 



76 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

that piece of the foundation of national existence for 
yourself. 

You will tell me I need not preach against these things, 
for I cannot mend them. No, good friends, I cannot ; but 
you can, and you will ; or something else can and will. Do 
yon think these phenomena are to stay always in their pre 
sent power or aspect ? All history shows, on the contrary, 
that to be the exact thing they never can do. Change 
must come ; but it is ours to determine whether change of 
growth, or change of death. Shall the Parthenon be in ruins 
on its rock, and Bolton priory in its meadow, but these mills 
of yours be the consummation of the buildings of the earth, 
and their wheels be as the wheels of eternity ? Think you 
that 'men may come, and men may go,' but — mills — go on 
for ever ? Not so ; out of these, better or worse shall come ; 
and it is for you to choose which. 

I know that none of this wrong is done w r ith deliberate 
purpose. I know, on the contrary, that you wish your work- 
men well ; that you do much for them, and that you desire to 
do more for them, if you saw your way to it safely. I know 
that many of you have done, and are every day doing, what- 
ever you feel to be in your power ; and that even all this 
wrong and misery are brought about by a warped sense of 
duty, each of you striving to do his best, without noticing 
that this best is essentially and centrally the best for himself, 



TRAFFIC. 77 

not for others. And all this has come of the spreading of 
that thrice accursed, thrice impious doctrine of the modern 
economist, that c To do the best for yourself, is finally to do 
the best for others.' Friends, our great Master said not so ; 
and most absolutely we shall find this world is not made so. 
Indeed, to do the best for others, is finally to do the best for 
ourselves; but it will not do to have our eyes fixed on that 
issue. The Pagans had got beyond that. Hear what a Pagan 
says of this matter ; hear what were, perhaps, the last writ- 
ten words of Plato, — if not the last actually written (for this 
we cannot know), yet assuredly in fact and power his parting 
words — in which, endeavouring to give full crowning and 
harmonious close to all his thoughts, and to speak the sum of 
them by the imagined sentence of the Great Spirit, his 
strength and his heart fail him, and the words cease, broken 
off for ever. It is the close of the dialogue called 'Critias,' 
in which he describes, partly from real tradition, partly in 
ideal dream, the early state of Athens ; and the genesis, and 
order, and religion, of the fabled isle of Atlantis; in which 
genesis he conceives the same first perfection and final dege- 
neracy of man, which in our own Scriptural tradition is ex- 
pressed by saying that the Sons of God intermarried with the 
daughters of men, for he supposes the earliest race to have 
been indeed the children of God ; and to have corrupted them- 
selves, until ' their spot was not the spot of his children. , 



78 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

And this, lie says, was the end ; that indeed ' through many 
generations, so long as the God's nature in them yet was full, 
they were submissive to the sacred laws, and carried, them- 
selves lovingly to all that had kindred with them in divine- 
ness ; for their uttermost spirit was faithful and true, and in 
every wise great ; so that, in all meekness of wisdom, they 
dealt with each other, and took all the chances of life ; and de- 
spising all things except virtue, they cared little what hap- 
pened day by day, and bore lightly the burden of gold and of 
possessions; for they saw that, if only their common love 
and virtue increased, all these things would be increased to- 
gether with them; but to set their esteem and ardent pur- 
suit upon material possession would be to lose that first, and 
their virtue and affection together with it. And by ,sueh 
reasoning, and what of the divine nature remained in them, 
they gained all this greatness of which we have already told ; 
but when the God's part of them faded and became extinct, 
being mixed again and again, and effaced by the prevalent 
mortality; and the human nature at last exceeded, they then 
became unable to endure the courses of fortune; and fell into 
shapelessness of life, and baseness in the sight of him who 
could see, having lost everything that was fairest of their hon- 
our ; while to the blind hearts which could not discern the 
true life, tending to happiness, it seemed that they were then 
chiefly noble and happy, being filled with all iniquity of inor« 



TRAFFIC. 79 

dinate possession and power. Whereupon, the God of Gods, 
whose Kinghood is in laws, beholding a once just nation thus 
cast into misery, and desiring to lay such punishment upon 
them as might make them repent into restraining, gathered 
together all the gods into his dwelling-place, which from hea- 
ven's centre overlooks whatever has part in creation ; and 
having assembled them, he said ' 



The rest is silence. So ended are the last words of the 
chief wisdom of the heathen, spoken of this idol of riches ; 
this idol of yours ; this golden image high by measureless cu- 
bits, set up where your green fields of England are furnace- 
burnt into the likeness of the plain of Dura : this idol, forbid- 
den to us, first of all idols, by our own Master and faith ; for- 
bidden to us also by every human lip that has ever, in any age 
or people, been accounted of as able to speak according to 
the purposes of God. Continue to make that forbidden deity 
your principal one, and soon no more art, no more science, no 
more pleasure will be possible. Catastrophe will come ; or 
worse than catastrophe, slow mouldering and withering into 
Hades. But if you can fix some conception of a true human 
state of life to be. striven for — life for all men as for your- 
selves — if you can determine some honest and simple order 
of existence ; following those trodden ways of wisdom, which 
are pleasantness, and seeking her quiet and withdrawn paths, 
which are peace ; — then, and so sanctifying wealth into ' com- 



80 THE C110WN OF WILD OLIVE. 

monwealth,' all your art, your literature, your daily labours, 
your domestic affection, and citizen's duty, will join and in 
crease into one magnificent harmony. You will know then 
how to build, well enough ; you will build with stone well, 
but with flesh better; temples not made with hands, but 
riveted of hearts ; and that kind of marble, crimson-veined, 
is indeed eternal. 



WAR. 




LECTURE III. 

(Delivered at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich.) 

WAR. 

Young soldieks, I do not doubt but that many of yon came 
unwillingly to-night, and many in merely contemptuous 
curiosity, to hear what a writer on painting could possibly 
say, or would venture to say, respecting your great art of 
war. You may well think within yourselves, that a painter 
might, perhaps without immodesty, lecture younger painters 
upon painting, but not young lawyers upon law, nor young 
physicians upon medicine — least of all, It may seem to you, 
young warriors upon war. And, indeed, when I was asked 
to address you, I declined at first, and declined long ; for I 
felt that you would not be interested in my special business, 
and would certainly think there was small need for me to 
come to teach you yours. Nay, I knew that there ought 
to be no such need, for the great veteran soldiers of Eng- 
land are now men every way so thoughtful, so noble, and so 
good, that no other teaching than their knightly example, and 
their few words of grave and tried counsel should be either 



84 THE CE0AVN OF WILD OLIVE. 

necessary for you, or oven, without assurance of due modesty 
in the offerer, endured by you. 

But being asked, not once nor twice, I have not ventured 
persistently to refuse ; and I will try, in very few words, to 
lay before you some reason why you should accept my 
xcuse. and hear me patiently. You may imagine that your 
work is wholly foreign to, and separate from mine. So far 
from that, all the pure and noble arts of peace are founded on 
war; no great art ever yet rose on earth, but among a nation 
of soldiers. There is no art among a shepherd people, if 
it remains at peace. There is no art among an agricultural 
people, if it remains at peace. Commerce is barely consist- 
ent with fine art ; but cannot produce it. Manufacture not 
only is unable to produce it, but invariably destroys whatever 
seeds of it exist. There is no great art possible to a nation 
but that which is based on battle. 

Now, though I hope you love fighting for its own sake, 
you must, I imagine, be surprised at my assertion that there 
is any such good fruit of fighting. You supposed, probably, 
that your office was to defend the works of peace, but 
certainly not to found them: nay, the common course of 
war, you may have thought, was only to destroy them. And 
truly, I who tell you this of the use of war, should have 
been the last of men to tell you so, had I trusted my own 
experience only. Hear why : I have given a considerable 



WAR. 85 

part of my life to the investigation of Venetian painting; 
and the result of that enquiry was ray fixing upon one man 
as the greatest of all Venetians, and therefore, as I believed, 
of all painters whatsoever. I formed this faith, (whether 
right or wrong matters at present nothing,) in the supremacy 
of the painter Tintoret, under a roof covered with his 
pictures ; and of those pictures, three of the noblest were 
then in the form of shreds of ragged canvas, mixed up with 
the laths of the roof, rent through by three Austrian shells. 
Now it is not every lecturer who could tell you that he had 
seen three of his favourite pictures torn to rags by bomb- 
shells. And after such a sight, it is not every lecturer who 
would tell you that, nevertheless, war was the foundation 
of all great art. 

Yet the conclusion is inevitable, from any careful compari- 
son of the states of great historic races at different periods. 
Merely to show you what I mean, I will sketch for you, 
very briefly, the broad steps of the advance of the best art 
of the world. The first dawn of it is in Egypt ; and the 
power of it is founded on the perpetual contemplation o^" 
death, and of future judgment, by the mind of a nation of 
which the ruling caste were priests, and the second, soldiers 
The greatest works produced by them are sculptures of 
their kings going out to battle, or receiving the homage of 
conquered armies. And you must remember also, as one 



HQ THE CEOWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

of the great keys to the splendour of the Egyptian nation, 
that the priests were not occupied in theology only. Their 
theology was the basis of practical government and law ; 
so that they were not so much priests as religious judges : 
the office of Samuel, among the Jews, being as nearly as 
possible correspondent to theirs. 

All the rudiments of art then, and much more than the 
rudiments of all science, are laid first by this great warrior- 
nation, which held in contempt all mechanical trades, and 
in absolute hatred the peaceful life of shepherds. From 
Egypt art passes directly into Greece, where all poetry, and 
all painting, are nothing else than the description, praise, or 
dramatic representation of war, or of the exercises which 
prepare for it, in their connection with offices of religion. 
All Greek institutions had first respect to war ; and their 
conception of it, as one necessary office of all human and 
divine life, is expressed simply by the images of their 
guiding gods. Apollo is the god of all wisdom of the intel- 
lect; he bears the arrow and the bow, before he bears the 
lyre. Again, Athena is the goddess of all wisdom in conduct. 
It is by the helmet and the shield, oftener than by the shuttle, 
that she is distinguished from other deities. 

There were, however, two great differences in principle 
between the Greek and the Egyptian theories of policy. 
In Greece there was no soldier caste ; every citizen was 



WAR. Si 

necessarily a soldier. And, again, while the Greeks rightly 
despised mechanical arts as much as the Egyptians, they did 
not make the fatal mistake of despising agricultural and pas 
toral life ; but perfectly honoured both. These two conditions 
of truer thought raise them quite into the highest rank of wise 
manhood that has yet been reached ; for all our great arts, 
and nearly all our great thoughts, have been borrowed or 
derived from them. Take away from us what they have 
given ; and I hardly can imagine how low the modern 
European would stand. 

Now, you are to remember, in passing to the next phase 
of history, that though you must have war to produce art — 
you must also have much more than war ; namely, an art- 
instinct or genius in the people ; and that, though all the 
talent for painting in the 'world won't make painters of you, 
unless you have a gift for fighting as well, you may have the 
gift for fighting, and none for painting. Now, in the next 
great dynasty of soldiers, the art-instinct is wholly wanting. 
I have not yet investigated the Roman character enough to 
tell you the causes of this ; but I believe, paradoxical as it 
may seem to you, that, however truly the Roman might say 
of himself that he was born of Mars, and suckled by the 
wolf, he was nevertheless, at heart, more of a farmer than a 
soldier. The exercises of war were with him practical, not 
poetical ; his poetry was in domestic life only, and the object 



88 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

of battle, i pacis imponere morem.' And the arts are exlin 
gnished in his bands, and do not rise again, until, with 
Gothic chivalry, there comes back into the mind of Europe a 
passionate delight in war itself, for the sake of war. And 
then, with the romantic knighthood which can imagine no 
other noble employment, — under the fighting kings of 
France, England, and Spain ; and under the fighting dukeships 
and citizenships of Italy, art is born again, and rises to her 
height in the great valleys of Lombarcly and Tuscany, through 
which there flows not a single stream, from all their Alps or 
Apennines, that did not once run dark red from battle : and it 
reaches its culminating glory in the city which gave to history 
the most intense type of soldiership yet seen among men ; — the 
city whose armies were led in their assault by their king, led 
through it to victory by their king, and so led, though that 
king of theirs was blind, and in the extremity of his age. 

And from this time forward, as peace is established or 
extended in Europe, the arts decline. They reach an 
unparalleled pitch of costliness, but lose their life, enlist 
themselves at last on the side of luxury and various corrup- 
tion, and, among wholly tranquil nations, wither utterly 
away ; remaining only in partial practice among races who, 
like the French and us, have still the minds, though we can- 
not all live the lives, of soldiers. 

4 It may be so,' I can suppose that a philanthropist might 



WAR. 89 

exclaim. ' Perish then the arts, if they can flourish only at such 
a cost. What worth is there in toys of canvas and stone, if 
compared to the joy and peace of artless domestic life ? ' And 
the answer is — truly, in themselves, none. But as expressions 
of the highest state of the human spirit, their worth -is infinite. 
As results they may be worthless, but, as signs, they are 
above price. For it is an assured truth that, whenever the 
faculties of men are at their fulness, they must express them- 
selves by art ; and to say that a state is without such expres- 
sion, is to say that it is sunk from its proper level of manly 
nature. So that, when I tell you that war is the foundation 
of all the arts, I mean also that it is the foundation of all the 
high virtues and faculties of men. • 

It was v ery strange to me to discover this ; and very dread- 
ful—but I saw it to be quite an undeniable fact. The com- 
mon notion that peace and the virtues of civil life flourished 
together, I found, to be wholly untenable. Peace and the 
vices of civil life only flourish together. We talk of peace 
and learning, and of peace and plenty, and of peace and civili- 
sation ; but I found that those were not the words which the 
Muse of History coupled together : that on her lips, the words 
were — peace and sensuality, peace and selfishness, peace and 
corruption, peace and death. I found, in brief, that all great 
nations learned their truth of word, and strength of thought, in 
war ; that they were nourished in war, and wasted by peace ; 



90 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

taught by war, and deceived by peace ; trained by war, and 
betrayed by peace ; — in a word, that they were born in war, 
and expired in peace. 

Yet now note carefully, in the second place, it is not all war 
of which this can be said — nor all dragon's teeth, which, 
sown, will start up into men. It is not the ravage of a bar- 
barian wolf-flock, as under Genseric or Suwarrow ; nor the 
habitual restlessness and rapine of mountaineers, as on the 
old borders of Scotland ; nor the occasional struggle of a 
strong peaceful nation for its life, as in the wars of the Swiss 
with Austria ; nor the contest of merely ambitious nations 
for extent of power, as in the wars of France under Napoleon, 
or the just terminated war in America. None of these forms 
of war build anything but tombs. But the creative or foun- 
dational war is that in which the natural restlessness and love 
of contest among men are disciplined, by consent, into modes 
of beautiful — though it may be fatal — play : in which the na- 
tural ambition and love of power of men are disciplined into 
the aggressive conquest of surrounding evil : and in which the 
natural instincts of self-defence are sanctified by the nobleness 
of the institutions, and purity of the households, which they 
are appointed to defend. To such war as this all men are born ; 
in such war as this any man may happily die ; and forth from 
such war as this have arisen throughout the extent of past 
ages, all the highest sanctities and virtues of humanity. 



WAE. 91 

1 shall therefore divide the war of which I would speak to 
you into three heads. War for exercise or play; war for 
dominion ; and, war for defence. 

I. And first, of war for exercise or play. I speak of it pri- 
marily in this light, because, through all past history, manly 
war has been more an exercise than anything else, among the 
classes who cause, and proclaim it. It is not a game to the 
conscript, or the pressed sailor; but neither of these are the 
causers of it. To the governor who determines that war 
shall be, and to the youths who voluntarily adopt it as their 
profession, it has always been a grand pastime ; and chiefly 
pursued because they had nothing else to do. And this is 
true without any exception. No king whose mind was fully 
occupied with the development of the inner resources of his 
kingdom, or with any other sufficing subject of thought, ever 
entered into war but on compulsion. No youth who was 
earnestly busy with any peaceful subject of study, or set on 
any serviceable course of action, ever voluntarily became a 
soldier. Occupy him early, and wisely, in agriculture or busi- 
ness, in science or in literature, and he will never think of war 
otherwise than as a calamity. But leave him idle ; and, the 
more brave and active and capable he is by nature, the more 
he will thirst for some appointed field for action ; and find, in 
the passion and peril of battle, the only satisfying fulfilment 
of his unoccupied being. And from the earliest incipient civil- 



92 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

isation until now, the population of the earth divides itself, 
when you look at it widely, into two races ; one of workers, 
and the other of players— one tilling the ground, manufactur- 
ing, building, and otherwise providing for the necessities of 
-ife ; — the other part proudly idle, and continually therefore 
needing recreation, in which they use the productive and 
laborious orders partly as their cattle, and partly as their 
puppets or pieces in the game of death. 

ISiow, remember, whatever virtue Or goodliness there may 
be in this game of war, rightly played, there is none when 
you thus play it with a multitude of small human pawns. 

If you, the gentlemen of this or any other kingdom, 
choose to make your pastime of contest, do so, and welcome ; 
but set not up these unhappy peasant-pieces upon the green 
fielded board. If the wager is to be of death, lay it on your 
own heads, not theirs. A goodly struggle in the Olympic 
dust, though it be the dust of the grave, the gods will look 
upon, and be with you in ; but they will not be with you, if 
you sit on the sides of the amphitheatre, whose steps are 
the mountains of earth, whose arena its valleys, to urge your 
peasant millions into gladiatorial war. You also, you tender 
and delicate women, for whom, and by whose command, all 
true battle has been, and must ever be ; you would perhaps 
shrink now, though you need not, from the thought of 
sitting as queens above set lists where the jousting game 



WAE. 93 

might be mortal. How much more, then, ought you to 
shrink from the thought of sitting above a theatre pit in 
which even a few condemned slaves were slaying each other 
only for your delight! And do you not shrink from the fact 
of sitting above a theatre pit, where, — not condemned slaves, 
■ — but the best and bravest of the poor sons of your people, 
slay each other, — not man to man, — as the coupled gladia- 
tors ; but race to race, in duel of generations ? You would 
tell me, perhaps, that you do not sit to see this ; and it is 
indeed true, that the women of Europe — those who have no 
heart-interest of their own at peril in the contest — draw the 
curtains of their boxes, and muffle the openings; so that 
from the pit of the circus of slaughter there may reach them 
only at intervals a half-heard cry and a murmur as of the 
wind's sighing, when myriads of souls expire. They shut 
out the death-cries ; and are happy, and talk wittily among 
themselves. That is the utter literal fact of what our ladies 
do in their pleasant lives. 

Nay, you might answer, speaking for them — ' We do not 
let these wars come to pass for our play, nor by our careless- 
ness; we cannot help them. How can any final quarrel of 
nations be settled otherwise than by war?' I cannot now 
delay, to tell you how political quarrels might be otherwise 
settled.. But grant that they cannot. Grant that no law of 
reason can be understood by nations; no law of justice sub- 



94 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

mitted to by them : and that, while questions of a few acres, 
and of petty cash, can be determined by truth and equity, 
the questions which are to issue in the perishing or saving of 
kingdoms can be determined only by the truth of the sword, 
and the equity of the rifle. Grant this, and even then, judge 
if it will always be necessary for you to put your quarrel into 
the hearts of your poor, and sign your treaties with peasants' 
blood. You would be ashamed to do this in your own 
private position and power. Why should yon not be ashamed 
also to do it in public place and power ? If you quarrel with 
your neighbour, and the quarrel be indeterminable by law, 
and mortal, you and he do not send your footmen to Batter- 
sea fields to fight it out ; nor do you set fire to his tenants' 
cottages, nor spoil their goods. You fight out your quarrel 
yourselves, and at your own danger, if at all. And you do 
not think it materially affects the arbitrement that one of you 
has a larger household than the other; so that, if the servants 
or tenants were brought into the field with their masters, the 
issue of the contest could not be doubtful? You either 
refuse the private duel, or you practise it under laws of 
honour, not of physical force; that so it may be, in a manner, 
justly concluded. Now the just or unjust conclusion of the 
private feud is of little moment, while the just or unjust conclu- 
sion of the public feud is of eternal moment : and yet, in this 
public quarrel, you take your servants' sons from their arms 



WAR. 95 

to fight for it, and your servants' food from their lips to sup 
port it; and the black seals on the parchment of your treaties 
of peace are the deserted hearth and the fruitless field. 
There is a ghastly ludicrousness in this, as there is mostly in 
these wide and universal crimes. Hear the statement of the 
very fact of it in the most literal words of the greatest of our 
English thinkers: — 

' What, speaking in quite unofficial language, is the net-purport and 
upshot of war ? To my own knowledge, for example, there dwell 
and toil, in the British village of Dumdrudge, usually some five hun- 
dred souls. From these, by certain "natural enemies" of the French, 
there are successively selected, during the French war, say thirty able- 
bodied men. Dumdrudge, at her own expense, has suckled and 
nursed them ; she has, not without difficulty and sorrow, fed them up 
to manhood, and even trained them to crafts, so that one can weave, 
another build, another hammer, and the weakest can stand under 
thirty stone avoirdupois. Nevertheless, amid much weeping and 
swearing, they are selected; all dressed in red; and shipped away, at 
the public charges, some two thousand miles, or say only to the south 
of Spain ; and fed there till wanted. 

'And now to that same spot in the south of Spain are thirty similar 
French artisans, from a French Dumdrudge, in like manner wending ; 
till at length, after infinite effort, the two parties come into actual 
juxtaposition ; and Thirty stands fronting Thirty, each with a gun in 
his hand. 

'Straightway the word u Fire! " is given, and they blow the souls 



96 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

out of one another, and in place of sixty brisk useful craftsmen, the 
world has s : xty dead carcas s, which it must bury, and anon she:! 
tears for. Had these men any quarrel ? Busy as the devil is, not the 
smallest! They lived far enough apart; were the entirest strangers; 
nay, in so wide a universe, there was even, unconsciously, by com- 
merce, some mutual helpfulness between them. How then? Sim- 
pleton! their governors had fallen out; and instead of shooting one 
another, had the cunning to make these poor blockheads shoot.' 
(Sartor Resartus.) 

Positively, then, gentlemen, the game of battle must not, 
and shall not, ultimately be played this way. But should it 
be played any way? Should it, if not by your servants, be 
practised by yourselves? I think, yes. Both history and 
human instinct seem alike to say, yes. All healthy men like 
fighting, and like the sense of danger ; all brave women like 
to hear of their fighting, and of their facing danger. This is 
a fixed instinct in the fine race of them; and I cannot help 
fancying that fair fight is the best play for them; and that a 
tournament was a better game than a steeple-chase. The 
time may perhaps come in France as well as here, for univer- 
sal hurdle-races and cricketing : but I do not think universal 
' crickets ' will bring out the best qualities of the nobles of 
either country. I use, in such question, the test which I have 
adopted, of the connection of war with other arts; and I 
reflect how, as a sculptor, I should feel, if I were asked to 



WAR. 9 V 

design a monument for a dead knight, in "Westminster abbey, 
with, a oar vino* of a bat at one end, and a ball at the other. 
It may be the remains in me only of savage Gothic prejudice; 
but I had rather carve it with a shield at one end, and a 
sword at the other. And this, observe, with no reference 
whatever to any story of duty done, or cause defended. 
Assume the knight merely to have ridden out occasionally to 
fkrht his neighbour for exercise : assume him even a soldier 
of fortune, and to have gained his bread, and filled his purse, 
at the sword's point. Still, I feel as if it were, somehow, 
grander and worthier in him to have made his bread by 
sword play than any other play; I had rather he had made it 
by thrusting than by batting; — much more, than by betting. 
Much rather that he should ride war horses, than back race 

horses; and — I say it sternly and deliberately — much 

rather would I have him slay his neighbour, than cheat 

him. 

But remember, so far as this may be true, the game 

of war is only that in which the full personal power of 

the human creature is brought out in management of its 

weapons. And this for three reasons : — 

First, the great justification of this game is that it truly 

when well played, determines who is the best man / — . 

who is the highest bred, the most self-denying, the most 

fearless, the coolest of nerve, the swiftest of eye and hand. 

6 



98 THE CROWiN" OF WILD OLIVE. 

You cannot test these qualities wholly, unless there is a 
clear possibility of the struggle's ending in death. It is 
only in the fronting of that condition that the full trial 
of the man, soul and body, comes out. You may go to 
your game of wickets, or of hurdles, or of cards, and 
any knavery that is in you may stay unchallenged all 
the while. But if the play may be ended at any moment by 
a lance-thrust, a man will probably make up his accounts 
a little before he enters it, Whatever is rotten and evil 
in him will w T eaken his hand more in holding a sword hilt, 
than in balancing a billiard cue ; and on the whole, the 
habit of living lightly hearted, in daily presence of death, 
always has had, and must have, a tendency both to the 
making and testing of honest men. But for the final test- 
ing, observe, you must make the issue of battle strictly 
dependent on fineness of frame, and firmness of hand. You 
must not make it the question, which of the combatants 
has the longest gun, or which has got behind the biggest 
tree, or which has the wind in his face, or which has gun- 
powder made by the best chemists, or iron smelted with 
the best coal, or the angriest mob at his back. Decide 
your battle, whether of nations, or individuals, on those 
terms ;— and you have only multiplied confusion, and added 
slaughter to iniquity. But decide your battle by pure trial 
which has the strongest arm, and steadiest heart, — and you 



WAR. 09 

have gone far to decide a great many matters besides, and 
to decide them rightly. 

And the other reasons for this mode of decision of cause, 
are the diminution both of the material destructiveness, 
or cost, and of the pnysical distress of war. For you must 
not think that in speaking to you in this (as you may 
imagine), fantastic praise of battle, I have overlooked the 
conditions weighing against me. I pray all of you, who 
have not read, to read with the most earnest attention, Mr. 
Helps's two essays on War and Government, in the first 
volume of the last series of ' Friends in Council.' Everything 
that can be urged against war is there simply, exhaustively, 
and most graphically stated. And all, there urged, is true. 
But the two great counts of evil alleged against war by 
that most thoughtful writer, hold only against modern w r ar. 
If you have to take away masses of men from all indus- 
trial employment, — to feed them by the labour of others, — 
to move them and provide them with destructive machines, 
varied daily in national rivalship of inventive cost ; if you 
have to ravage the country which you attack, — to destroy 
for a score of future years, its roads, its woods, its cities, 
and its harbours ; — and if, finally, having brought masses 
of men, counted by hundreds of thousands, face to face, you 
tear those masses to pieces with jagged shot, and leave thfl 
fragments of living creatures, countlessly beyond all help of 



100 THE CUOW2* OF WILD OUYE. 

Surgery, to starve and parch, through days of torture, down 
into clots of clay — what Look of accounts shall record the 
cost of your work ; — What book of judgment sentence the 
guilt of it? 

That, I say, is modern war, — scientific war, — chemical and 
mechanic war, worse even than the savage's poisoned arrow. 
And yet you will tell me, perhaps, that any other war than this 
is impossible now. It may be so ; the progress of science can- 
not, perhaps, be otherwise registered than by new facilities 
of destruction ; and the brotherly love of our enlarging 
Christianity be only proved by multiplication of murder. 
Yet hear, for a moment, what war was, in Pagan and igno- 
rant days ; — what war might yet be, if we could extinguish 
our science in darkness, and join the heathen's practice to the 
Christian's theory. I read you this from a book which proba- 
bly most of you know well, and all ought to know — Muller's 
1 Dorians ; '—but I have put the points I wish you to remem- 
ber in closer connection than in his text. 

'The chief characteristic of the warriors of Sparta was 
great composure and subdued strength ; the violence (Xutftfa) 
of Aristodcmus and Isadas being considered as deserving 
rather of blame than praise; and these qualities in general 
distinguished the Greeks from the northern Barbarians, whose 
boldness always consisted in noise and tumult. For the same 
reason the Spartans sacrificed to the Muses before an action ; 



WAR. 101 

these goddesses being expected to produce regularity and 
order in battle; as they sacrificed on the same occasion in 
Crete to the god of love, as the confirmer of mutual esteem 
and shame. Every man put on a crown, when the band of 
flute-players gave the signal for attack ; all thw shields of the 
line glittered with their high polish, and mingled their 
splendour with the dark red of the purple mantles, which 
were meant both to adorn the combatant, ai*d to conceal the 
blood of the wounded; to fall well and decorously being an 
incentive the more to the most heroic valour. The conduct 
of the Spartans in battle denotes a high and noble disposition, 
which rejected all the extremes of brutal rage. The pursuit 
of the enemy ceased when the victory was completed ; and 
after the signal for retreat had been given, all hostilities 
ceased. The spoiling of arms, at least during the battle, was 
also interdicted ; and the consecration of the spoils of slain 
enemies to the gods, as, in general, all rejoicings for victory, 
were considered as ill-omened.' 

Such was the war of the greatest soldiers who prayed to 
heathen gods. What Christian war is, preached by Chris- 
tian ministers, let any one tell you, who saw the sacred 
crowning, and heard the sacred flute-playing, and was 
inspired and sanctified by the divinely-measured and musi- 
cal language, of any North American regiment preparing 
for its charge. And what is the relative cost of life in 



102 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

pagan and Christian wars, let this one fact tell you : — the 
Spartans won the decisive battle of Corinth with the loss 
of eight men ; the victors at indecisive Gettysburg .confess 
to the loss of 30,000. 

II. I pass now to our second order of war, the commonest 
among men, that undertaken in desire of dominion. And 
let me ask you to think for a few moments what the real 
meaning of this desire of dominion is — first in the minds of 
kings — then in that of nations. 

'Now, mind you this first, — that I speak either about kings, 
or masses of men, with a fixed conviction that human nature 
is a noble and beautiful thing ; not a foul nor abase thing. 
All the sin of men I esteem as their disease, not their nature ; 
as a folly which may be prevented, not a necessity which 
must be accepted. And my wonder, even when things are 
at their worst, is always at the height which this human 
nature can attain. Thinking it high, I find it always a higher 
thing than I thought it; while those who think it low, find 
it, and will find it, always lower than they thought it : the 
fact being, that it is infinite, and capable of infinite height 
and infinite fall ; but the nature of it — and here is the faith 
which I would have you hold with me — the nature of it is in 
the nobleness, not in the catastrophe. 

Take the faith in its utmost terms. When the captain of 
the 'London' shook hands with his mate, saying 'God speed 



WAE. 103 

you! I will go down with my passengers,' that I believe to 
he ' human nature.' He does not do it from any religious 
motive — from any hope of reward, or any fear of punish- 
ment ; he does it because he is a man. But when a mother, 
living among the fair fields of merry England, gives hei 
two-year-old child to be suffocated under a mattress in hei 
inner room, while the said mother waits and talks outside ; 
that I believe to be not human nature. You have the two 
extremes there, shortly. And you, men, and mothers, who 
are here face to face with me to-night, I call upon you to say 
which of these is human, and which inhuman — which ' natu- 
ral ' and which ' unnatural ? ' Choose your creed at once, I 
beseech you : — choose it with unshaken choice — choose it for 
ever. Will you take, for foundation of act and hope, the 
faith that this man was such as God made him, or that this 
woman was such as God made her? Which of them has 
failed from their nature — from their present, possible, actual 
nature ; — not their nature of long ago, but their nature of 
now? Which has betrayed it — falsified it? Did the guar- 
dian who died in his trust, die inhumanly, and as a fool ; and 
did the murderess of her child fulfil the law of her being? 
Choose, I say; infinitude of choices hang upon this. You 
have had false prophets among you — for centuries you have 
had them — solemnly warned against them though you were ; 
false prophets, who have told you that all men are nothing 



104 THE CROWX OF WILD OLIVE. 

but fiends or wolves, half beast, half devil. Believe that, 
and indeed you may sink to that. But refuse that, and have 
faith that God 'made you upright,' though you have sought 
out many inventions; so, you will strive daily to become 
more what your Maker meant and means you to be, and 
daily gives you also the power to be — and you will cling 
more and more to the nobleness and virtue that is in you, 
saying, ' My righteousness I hold fast, and will not let it go.' 

I have put this to you as a choice, as if you might hold 
either of these creeds you liked best. But there is in reality 
no choice for you; the facts being quite easily ascertainable. 
You have no business to think about this matter, or to choose 
in it. The broad fact is, that a human creature of the highest 
race, and most perfect as a human thing, is invariably both 
kind and true ; and that as you lower the race, you get 
cruelty and falseness, as you get deformity : and this so 
steadily and assuredly, that the two great words which, in 
their first use, meant only perfection of race, have come, by 
consequence of the invariable connection of virtue with the 
fine human nature, both to signify benevolence of disposition. 
The word generous, and the word gentle, both, in their origin, 
meant only c of pure race,' but because charity and tenderness 
are inseparable from this purity of blood, the words which 
once stood only for pride, now stand as synonyms for virtue. 

Now, this being the true power of our inherent humanity, 



WAR. 1 05 

and seeing that all the aim of education should be to develop 
this; — and seeing also what magnificent self sacrifice the 
higher classes of men are capable of, for any cause that they 
understand or feel, — it is wholly inconceivable to me how 
well-educated princes, who ought to be of all gentlemen the 
gentlest, and of all nobles the most generous, and whose title 
of royalty means only their function of doing every man 
'•right'' — how these, I say, throughout history, should so 
rarely pronounce themselves on the side of the poor and of 
justice, but continually maintain themselves and their own 
interests by oppression of the poor, and by wresting of justice ; 
and how this should be accepted as so natural, that the word 
loyalty, which means faithfulness to law T , is used as if it were 
only the duty of a people to be loyal to their king, and not 
the duty of a king to be infinitely more loyal to his people. 
ITow comes it to pass that a captain will die with his pass- 
engers, and lean over the gunwale to give the parting boat its 
course; but that a king will not usually die with, much less 
for, his passengers, — thinks it rather incumbent on his pas- 
sengers, in any number, to die for him? Think, I beseech 
you, of the wonder of this. The sea captain, not captain by 
divine light, but only by company's appointment ; — not a 
man of royal descent, but only a plebeian who can steer ; — ■ 
not with the eyes of the world upon him, but with feeble 

chance, depending on one poor boat, of his name being ever 

5* 



106 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

heard above the wash of the fatal waves ; — not with the cause 
of a nation resting on his act, but helpless to save so much as 
a child from among the lost crowd with whom he resolves to 
be lost, — yet goes down quietly to his grave, rather than 
break his faith to these few emigrants. But your captain by 
divine right, — your captain with the hues of a hundred shields 
of kings upon his breast, — your captain whose every deed, 
brave or base, will be illuminated or branded for ever before 
unescapable eyes of men, — your captain whose every thought 
and act are beneficent, or fatal, from sunrising to setting, 
blessing as the sunshine, or shadowing as the night, — this 
captain, as you find him in history, for the most part thinks 
only how he may tax his passengers, and sit at most ease in 
his state cabin ! 

For observe, if there had been indeed in the hearts of the 
rulers of great multitudes of men any such conception of 
work for the good of those under their command, as there is 
in the good and thoughtful masters of any small company of 
men, not only wars for the sake of mere increase of power 
could never take place, but our idea of power itself would be 
entirely altered. Do you suppose that to think and act even 
for a million of men, to hear their complaints, watch their 
weaknesses, restrain their vices, make laws for them, lead 
them, day by day, to purer life, is not enough for one man's 
work ? If any of us were absolute lord only of a district of 



WAE. 107 

a hundred miles square, and were resolved on doing our ut- 
most for it ; making it feed as large a number of people as 
possible ; making every clod productive, and every rock 
defensive, and every human being happy ; should we not 
have enough on our hands think you? But if the ruler has 
any other aim than this ; if, careless of the result of his inter- 
ference, he desire only the authority to interfere ; and, re- 
gardless of what is ill clone or well-done, cares only that it 
shall be done at his bidding ; — if he would rather do two hun- 
dred miles' space of mischief, than one hundred miles' space of 
good, of course he will try to add to his territory ; and to add 
inimitably. But does he add to his power? Do you call it 
power in a child, if he is allowed to play with the wheels and 
bands of some vast engine, pleased with their murmur and 
whirl, till his unwise touch, wandering where it ought not, 
scatters beam and wheel into ruin ? Yet what machine is so 
vast, so incognisable, as the working of the mind of a nation ; 
what child's touch so wanton, as the word of a selfish king? 
And yet, how long have we allowed the historian to speak of 
the extent of the calamity a man causes, as a just ground for 
his pride ; and to extol him as the greatest prince, who is 
only the centre of the widest error. Follow out this thought 
by yourselves ; and you will find that all power, properly so 
called, is wise and benevolent. There may be capacity in a 
drifting fire-ship to destroy a fleet ; there may be venom 



108 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

enough in a dead body to infect a nation : — but w Inch of you, 
the most ambitious, would desire a drifting kinghood, robed 
in consuming fire, or a poison-dipped sceptre whose touch 
was mortal ? There is no true potency, remember, but that 
of help ; nor true ambition, but ambition to save. 

And then, observe farther, this true power, the power 
of saving, depends neither on multitude of men, nor on 
extent of territory. We are continually assuming that nations 
become strong according to their numbers. They indeed 
become so, if those numbers can be made of one mind ; but 
how are you sure you can stay them in one mind, and keep 
them from having north and south minds ? Grant them 
unanimous, how know you they will be unanimous in right ? 
If they are unanimous in wrong, the more they are, essen- 
tially the weaker they are. Or, suppose that they can neither 
be of one mind, nor of two minds, but can only be of no 
mind ? Suppose they are a mere helpless mob ; tottering 
into precipitant catastrophe, like a waggon load of stones 
when the wheel comes off. Dangerous enousrh for their 
neighbours, certainly, but not 'powerful.' 

Neither does strength depend on extent of territory, any 
more than upon number of population. Take up your maps 
when you go home this evening, — put the cluster of British 
Isles beside the mass of South America ; and then consider 
whether any race of men need care how much ground they 



WAR. 109 

stand upon. The strength is in the men, and in their unity 
and virtue, not in their standing room: a little group of wise 
hearts is better than a wilderness full of fools; and only th.it 
nation gains true territory, which gains itself. 

And now for the brief practical outcome of all this. Re 
member, no government is ultimately strong, but in propor- 
tion to its kindness and justice ; and that a nation does not 
strengthen, by merely multiplying and diffusing itself. We 
have not strengthened as yet, by multiplying into America. 
Nay, even when it has not to encounter the separating con- 
ditions of emigration, a nation need not boast itself of multi- 
plying on its own ground, if it multiplies only as flies or locusts 
do, w T ith the god of flies for its god. It multiplies its strengt h 
only by increasing as one great family, in perfect fellowship 
and brotherhood. And lastly, it does not strengthen itself 
by seizing dominion over races whom it cannot benefit. 
Austria is not strengthened, but weakened, by her grasp of 
Lombardy; and whatever apparent increase of majesty and 
of wealth may have accrued to us from the possession of 
India, whether these prove to us ultimately power or weak- 
ness, depends wholly on the degree in which our influence on 
the native race shall be benevolent and exalting. But, as it 
is at their own peril that any race extends their dominion in 
mere desire of power, so it is at their own still greater peril 
that they refuse to undertake aggressive war, according to 



110 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

their force, whenever they are assured that their authority 
would be helpful and protective. Nor need you listen to any 
sophistical objection of the impossibility of knowing when n 
people's help is needed, or when not. Make your national 
conscience clean, and your national eyes will soon be clear. 
ISTo man who is truly ready to take part in a noble quarrel 
will ever stand long in doubt by whom, or in what cause, his 
aid is needed. I hold it my duty to make no political state- 
ment of any special bearing in this presence ; but I tell you 
broadly and boldly, that, within these last ten years, we 
English have, as a knightly nation, lost our spurs : we have 
fought where we should not have fought, for gain ; and we 
have been passive where we should not have been passive, 
for fear. I tell you that the principle of non-intervention, as 
now preached among us, is as selfish and cruel as the worst 
frenzy of conquest, and differs from it only by being not only 
malignant, but dastardly. 

I know, however, that my opinions on this subject differ too 
widely from those ordinarily held, to be any farther intruded 
upon you ; and therefore I pass lastly to examine the con- 
ditions of the third kind of noble war ; — war waged simply 
for defence of the country in which we were born, and for the 
maintenance and execution of her laws, by whomsoever threat- 
ened or defied. It is to this duty that I suppose most men 
entering the army consider themselves in reality to be bound, 



WAR. 1 1 I 

and I want you now to reflect what the laws of mere defence 
are; and what the soldier's duty, as now understood, or sup- 
posed to be understood. You have solemnly devoted your 
selves to be English soldiers, for the guardianship of England. 
I want you to feel what this vow of yours indeed means, or* 
is gradually coming to mean. You take it upon you, first, 
while you are sentimental schoolboys ; you go into your mili- 
tary convent, or barracks, just as a girl goes into her convent 
while she is a sentimental schoolgirl ; neither of you then 
know what you are about, though both the good soldiers and 
good nuns make the best of it afterwards. You don't un- 
derstand perhaps why I call you ' sentimental ' schoolboys, 
when you go into the army ? Because, on the whole, it is 
love of adventure, of excitement, of fine dress and. of the 
pride of fame, all which are sentimental motives, which 
chiefly make a boy like going into the Guards better than 
into a counting-house. You fancy, perhaps, that there is a 
severe sense of duty mixed with these peacocky motives? 
And in the best of you, there is ; but do not think that it is 
principal. If you cared to do your duty to your country in a 
prosaic and unsentimental way, depend upon it, there is now 
truer duty to be done in raising harvests, than in burning 
them ; more in building houses, than in shelling them — more 
in winning money by your own work, wherewith to helf 
men, than in taxing other people's work, for money where- 



112 THE CBOWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

with to slay men; more duty finally, in honest and unselfish 
living than in honest and unselfish dying, though that seems 
to your boys' e} r es the bravest. So far then, as for your- own 
honour, and the honour of your families, you choose brave 
death in a red coat before brave life in a black one, you are 
sentimental ; and now see what this passionate vow of yours 
comes to. For a little while you ride, and you hunt tigers or 
savages, you shoot, and are shot; you are happy, and proucl, 
always, and honoured and wept if you die ; and you are 
satisfied with your life, and with the end of it; believing, on 
the whole, that good rather than harm of it comes to others, 
and much pleasure to you. But as the sense of duty enters 
into your forming minds, the vow takes another aspect. You 
find that you have put yourselves into the hand of your 
country as a weapon. You have vowed to strike, when she 
bids you, and to stay scabbard ed when she bids you ; all that 
you need answer for is, that you fail not in her grasp. And 
there is goodness in this, and greatness, if you can trust the 
hand and heart of the Britomart who has braced you to her 
side, and are assured that when she leaves you sheathed in 
darkness, there is no need for your flash to the sun. But 
remember, good and noble as this state may be, it is a state 
of slavery. There are different kinds of slaves and different 
masters. Some slaves are scourged to their work by whips, 
others are scourged to it by restlessness or ambition. It cloeg 



WAK. J 13 

no1 matter what the whip is ; it is none the less a whip, because 
you have cut thongs for it out of your own souls: the fact, so 
far, of slavery, is in being driven to your work without 
thought, at another's bidding. Again, some slaves are bought 
with money, and others with praise. It matters not what the 
purchase-money is. The distinguishing sign of slavery is to 
have a price, and be bought for it. Again, it matters not 
what kind of work you are set on ; some slaves are set to 
forced diggings, others to forced marches ; some dig furrows, 
others field-works, and others graves. Some press the juice 
of reeds, and some the juice of vines, and some the blood of 
men. The fact of the captivity is the same whatever work 
we are set upon, though the fruits of the toil may be different. 
But, remember, in thus vowing ourselves to be the slaves of 
any master, it ought to be some subject of forethought with 
us, what work he is likely to put us upon. You may think 
that the whole duty of a soldier is to be passive, that it is the 
country you have left behind who is to command, and you 
have only to obey. But are you sure that you have left all 
your country behind, or that the part of it you have so left is 
indeed the best part of it ? Suppose — and, remember, it is 
quite conceivable — that you yourselves are indeed the best 
part of England; that you, who have become the slaves, 
ought to have been the masters; and that those who are the 
masters, ought to have been the slaves ! If it is a noble and 



114 THE CE0AVN OF WILD OLIVE. 

whole-hearted England, whose bidding you are bound to da, 
it is well ; but if you are yourselves the best of her heart, and 
the England you have left be but a half-hearted England, how 
say you of your obedience ? You were too proud to become 
shopkeepers : are you satisfied then to become the servants of 
shopkeepers ? You were too proud to become merchants or 
farmers yourselves : will you have merchants or farmers then 
for your field marshals ? You had no gifts of special grace 
for Exeter Hall : will you have some gifted person thereat 
for your commander-in-chief, to judge of your work, and re- 
ward it ? You imagine yourselves to be the army of Eng- 
land : how if you should find yourselves, at last, only the 
police of her manufacturing towns, and the beadles of her 
little Bethels? 

It is not so yet, nor will be so, I trust, for ever ; but what 
I want you to see, and to be assured of, is, that the ideal 
of soldiership is not mere passive obedience and bravery ; 
that, so far from this, no country is in a healthy state which 
has separated, even in a small degree, her civil from her 
military power. All states of the world, however great, 
fall at once when they use mercenary armies; and although 
it is a less instant form of error (because involving no na- 
tional taint of cowardice), it is yet an error no less ultimately 
fatal — it is the error especially of modern times, of which 
we cannot yet know all the calamitous consequences — to 



WAE. 115 

take away the best blood and strength of the nation, all tho 
soul-substance of it that is brave, and careless of reward, 
and scornful of pain, and faithful in trust; and to cast that 
into steel, and make a mere sword of it; taking away its 
voice and will; but to keep the worst part of the nation- 
whatever is cowardly, avaricious, sensual, and faithless — ■ 
and to give to this the voice, to this the authority, to this 
the chief privilege, where there is least capacity, of thought. 
The fulfilment of your vow for the defence of England will 
by no means consist in carrying out such a system. You 
are not true soldiers, if you only mean to stand at a shop 
door, to protect shop-boys who are cheating inside. A 
soldier's vow to his country is that he will die for the 
guardianship of her domestic virtue, of her righteous laws, 
and of her anyway challenged or endangered honour. A 
state without virtue, without laws, and without honour, he 
is bound not to defend ; nay, bound to redress by his own 
right hand that which he sees to be base in her. So sternly 
is this the law of Nature and life, that a nation once utterly 
corrupt can only be redeemed by a military despotism — - 
never by talking, nor by its free effort. And the health 
of any state consists simply in this : that in it, those who 
are wisest shall also be strongest; its rulers should be also 
its soldiers ; or, rather, by force of intellect more than of 
sword, its soldiers its rulers. Whatever the hold which the 



116 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

aristocracy of England has on the heart of England, in 
that they are still always in front of her battles, this hold 
will not be enough, unless they are also in front of hei* 
thoughts. And truly her thoughts need good captain's 
eading now, if ever ! Do you know what, by this beautiful 
division of labour (her brave men fighting, and her cowards 
thinking), she has come at last to think? Here is a bit 
of paper in ray hand,* a good one too, and an honest one ; 
quite representative of the best common public thought 
of England at this moment ; and it is holding forth in one 
of its leaders upon our ' social welfare,' — upon our ' vivid 
life' — upon the 'political supremacy of Great Britain.' 

* I do not care to refer to the journal quoted, because the article was 
unworthy of its general tone, though in order to enable the audience to 
verify the quoted sentence, I left the number containing it on the table, 
when I delivered this lecture. But a saying of Baron Liebig's, quoted at 
the head of a leader on the same subject in the ' Daily Telegraph ' of Jan- 
uary 11, 1866, summarily digests and presents the maximum folly of 
modern thought in this respect. 'Civilization,' says the Baron, 'is the 
economy of power, and English power is coal.' Not altogether so, my 
chemical friend. Civilization is the making of civil persons, which is a 
kind of distillation of which alembics are incapable, and does not at all 
imply the turning of a small company of gentlemen into a large company 
of ironmongers. And English power (what little of it may be left), is by 
no means coal, but, indeed, of that which, 'when the whole world turns 
to coal, then chiefly lives.' 



WAE. 117 

And what do you think all these are owing to? To what 
our English sires have done for us, and taught us, asce after 
age ? No : not to that. To our honesty of heart, or cool- 
ness of head, or steadiness of will ? No: not to these. To 
our thinkers, or our statesmen, or our poets, or our cap- 
tains, or our martyrs, or the patient labour of our poor? 
No: not to these; or at least not to these in any chief 
measure. Nay, says the journal, 'more than any agency, 
it is the cheapness and abundance of our coal which have 
made us what we are.' If it be so, then 'ashes to ashes' 
be our epitaph ! and the sooner the better. I tell you, 
gentlemen of England, if ever you would have your country 
breathe the pure breath of heaven again, and receive again a 
soul into her body, instead of rotting into a carcase, blown 
up in the belly with carbonic acid (and great that way), you 
must think, and feel, for your England, as well as fight for 
her : you must teach her that all the true greatness she 
ever had, or ever can have, she won while her fields were 
green and her faces ruddy ; — that greatness is still possible 
for Englishmen, even though the ground be not hollow 
under their feet, nor the sky black over their heads ; — and 
that, when the day comes for their country to lay her 
honours in the dust, her crest will not rise from it more 
loftily because it is dust of coal. Gentlemen, I tell you, 
solemnly, that the day is coming when the soldiers of 



118 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

England must be her tutors ; and the captains of her army, 
captains also of her mind. 

And now, remember, you soldier youths, who arc. thus 
in all ways the hope of your country ; or must be, if she 
have any hope : remember that your fitness for all future 
trust depends upon what you are now. N~o good soldiei 
in his old age was ever careless or indolent in his youth. 
Many a giddy and thoughtless boy has become a good 
bishop, or a good lawyer, or a good merchant ; but no such 
an one ever became a good general. I challenge you, in 
all history, to find a record of a good soldier who was not 
grave and earnest in his youth. And, in general, I have 
no patience with people who talk about ' the thoughtless- 
ness of youth ' indulgently. I had infinitely rather hear 
of thoughtless old age, and the indulgence due to that. 
When a man has done his work, and nothing can any way 
be materially altered in his fate, let him forget his toil, 
and jest with his fate, if he will ; but what excuse can you 
find for wilfulness of thought, at the very time when every 
crisis of future fortune hangs on your decisions ? A youth 
thoughtless ! when all the happiness of his home for ever 
depends on the chances, or the passions, of an hour ! A 
youth thoughtless ! when the career of all his days depends 
on the opportunity of a moment! A youth thoughtless/ 
when his every act is a foundation-stone of future conduct, 



WAR. 1 1 9 

and every imagination a fountain of life or death ! Be 
thoughtless in any after years, rather than now — though, 
indeed, there is only one place where a man may be nobly 
thoughtless, — his deathbed. No thinking should ever be 
left to be done there. 

Having, then, resolved that you will not waste recklessly, 
but earnestly use, these early days of yours, remember that 
all the duties of her children to England may be summed 
in two words — industry, and honour. I say first, industry, 
for it is in this that soldier youth are especially tempted to 
fail. Yet, surely, there is no reason, because your life may 
possibly or probably be shorter than other men's, that you 
should therefore waste more recklessly the portion of it 
that is granted you ; neither do the duties of your profes- 
sion, which require you to keep your bodies strong, in any 
wise involve the keeping of your minds weak. So far 
from that, the experience, the hardship, and the activity 
of a soldier's life render his powers of thought more accu 
rate than those of other men ; and while, for others, all 
knowledge is often little more than a means of amusement, 
there is no form of science which a soldier may not at 
some time or other find bearing on business of life and 
death, A young mathematician may be excused for lan- 
guor in studying curves to be described only with a pen- 
cil ; but not in tracing those which are to be described 



120 THE CROWK OF WILD OLTVE. 

with a rocket. Your knowledge of a wholesome herb ma) 
involve the feeding of an army; and acquaintance with an 
obscure point of geography, the success of a campaign. 
Never waste an instant's time, therefore; the sin of idle- 
ness is a thousand-fold greater in you than in other 
youths ; for the fates of those who will one day be under 
your command hang upon your knowledge ; lost moments 
now will be lost lives then, and every instant which you 
carelessly take for play, you buy with blood. But there is 
one way of wasting time, of all the vilest, because it wastes, 
not time only, but the interest and energy of your minds. 
Of all the ungentlemanly habits into which you can fall, 
the vilest is betting, or interesting yourselves in the issues 
of betting. It unites nearly every condition of folly and 
vice ; you concentrate your interest upon a matter of chance, 
instead of upon a subject of true knowledge; and you back 
opinions which you have no grounds for forming, merely 
because they are your own. All the insolence of egotism 
is in this; and so far as the love of excitement is compli- 
cated with the hope of winning money, you turn yourselves 
into the basest sort of tradesmen — those who live by specu- 
lation. Were there no other ground for industry, this 
would be a sufficient one ; that it protected you from the 
temptation to so scandalous a vice. Work faithfully, and 
you will put yourselves in possession of a glorious and en- 



WAR. 121 

iarging happiness; not such as can be won by the speed 

of a horse, or marred by the obliquity of a ball. 

First, then, by industry you must fulfil your vow to your 

country; but all industry and earnestness will be useless 

unless they are consecrated by your resolution to be in all 

things men of honour ; not honour in the common sense only, 

but in the highest. Rest on the force of the two main words 

in the great verse, integer vitaa, scelerisque purus. You 

have vowed your life to England ; give it her wholly — a 

bright, stainless, perfect life — a knightly life. Because you 

have to fight with machines instead of lances, there may be a 

necessity for more ghastly danger, but there is none for less 

worthiness of character, than in olden time. You may be 

true knights yet, though perhaps not equites / you may have 

to call yourselves 'cannonry' instead of 'chivalry,' but that 

is no reason why you should not call yourselves true men. 

So the first thing you have to see to in becoming soldiers 

is that you make yourselves wholly true. Courage is a mere 

matter of course among any ordinarily well-born youths ; 

but neither truth nor gentleness is matter of course. You 

must bind them like shields about your necks ; you must 

write them on the tables of your hearts. Though it be not 

exacted of you, yet exact it of yourselves, this vow of stainless 

truth. Your hearts are, if you leave them unstirred, as 

tombs in which a god lies buried. Vow yourselves crusaders 

G 



122 THE GROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

to redeem that sacred sepulchre. And remember, before 
all things — for no other memory will be so protective of 
you — that the highest law of this knightly truth is that 
under which it is vowed to women. Whomsoever else you 
deceive, whomsoever you injure, whomsoever you leave 
unaided, you must not deceive, nor injure, nor leave unaided, 
according to your power, any woman of whatever rank. 
Believe me, every virtue of the higher phases of manly 
character begins in this ; — in truth and modesty before the 
face of all maidens ; in truth and pity, or truth and reverence, 
to all womanhood. 

And now let me turn for a moment to you, — wives and 
maidens, who are the souls- of soldiers ; to you, — mothers, 
who have devoted your children to the great hierarchy 0/ 
war. Let me ask you to consider what part you have to 
take for the aid of those who love you ; for if you fail in your 
part they cannot fulfil theirs ; such absolute helpmates you 
are that no man can stand without that help, nor labour in his 
own strength. 

I know your hearts, and that the truth of them never 
fails when an hour of trial comes which you recognise for 
such. But you know not when the hour of trial first finds 
you, nor when it verily finds you. You imagine that you are 
only called upon to wait and to suffer ; to surrender and to 
mourn. You know that you must not weaken the hearts 



WAR. 123 

of your husbands and lovers, even by the one fear of which 
those hearts are capable, — the fear of parting from you, or of 
causing you grief. Through weary years of separation* 
through fearful expectancies of unknown fate ; through the 
tenfold bitterness of the sorrow which might so easily have 
been joy, and the tenfold yearning for glorious life struck 
down in its prime — through all these agonies you fail not, 
and never will fail. But your trial is not in these. To be 
heroic in danger is little; — you are Englishwomen. To be 
heroic in change and sway of fortune is little ; — for do you 
not love ? To be patient through the great chasm and pause 
of loss is little ; — for do you not still love in heaven ? But to 
be heroic in happiness ; to bear yourselves gravely and right- 
eously in the dazzling of the sunshine of morning ; not to forget 
the God in whom you trust, when He gives you most ; not 
to fail those who trust you, when they seem to need you 
least ; this is the difficult fortitude. It is not in the pining 
of absence, not in the peril of battle, not in the wasting of 
sickness, that your prayer should be most passionate, or your 
guardianship most tender. Pray, mothers and maidens, for 
your young soldiers in the bloom of their pride ; pray for 
them, while the only dangers round them are in their own 
wayward wills ; watch you, and pray, when they have to 
face, not death, but temptation. But it is this fortitude also 
for which there is the crowning reward. Believe me, the 



124 THE CEOWJS" OF WILD OLIVE. 

whole course and character of your lovers' lives is in your 
hands ; what you would have them be, they shall be, if you 
not only desire to have them so, but deserve to have them 
so ; for they are but mirrors in which you will see yourselves 
imaged. If you are frivolous, they will be so also ; if you 
have no understanding of the scope of their duty, they also 
wdll forget it ; they will listen, — they can listen, — to no other 
interpretation of it than that uttered from your lips. Bid 
them be brave ; — they will be brave for you ; bid them be 
cowards ; and how noble soever they be ;— they will quail for 
you. Bid them be wise, and they will be wise for you ; mock 
at their counsel, they will be fools for you : such and so abso- 
lute is your rule over them. You fancy, perhaps, as you have 
been told so often, that a wife's rule should only be over her 
husband's house, not over his mind. Ah, no ! the true rule is 
just the reverse of that; a true wife, in her husband's house, 
is his servant ; it is in his heart that she is queen. Whatever 
of the best he can conceive, it is her part to be ; whatever of 
highest he can hope, it is hers to promise ; all that is dark in 
him she must purge into purity ; all that is failing in him she 
must strengthen into truth : from her, through all the 
world's clamour, he must win his praise ; in her, through all 
the world's warfare, he must find his peace. 

And, now, but one word more. You may wonder, per* 
haps, that I have spoken all this night in praise of war 



WAR. 125 

Yet, truly, if it might be, I, for one, would fain join in the 
cadence of hammer-strokes that should beat swords into 
ploughshares : and that this cannot be, is not the fault of us 
men. It is your fault. Wholly yours. Only by your com- 
mand, or by your permission, can any contest take place 
among us. And the real, final, reason for all the poverty, 
misery, and rage of battle, throughout Europe, is simply that 
you women, however good, however religious, however self- 
sacrificing for those whom you love, are too selfish and too 
thoughtless to take pains for any creature out of your own 
immediate circles. You fancy that you are sorry for the 
pain of others. Now I just tell you this, that if the usual 
course of war, instead of unroofing peasants' houses, and 
ravaging peasants' fields, merely broke the china upon your 
own drawing-room tables, no war in civilised countries 
would last a week. I tell you more, that at whatever 
moment you chose to put a period to war, you could do it 
with less trouble than you take any day to go out to dinner. 
You know, or at least you might know if you would think, 
that every battle you hear of has made many widows and 
orphans. We have, none of us, heart enough truly to mourn 
with these. But at least we might put on the outer symbols 
of mourning with them. Let but every Christian lady who 
has conscience toward God, vow that she will mourn, at least 
outwardly, for His killed creatures. Your praying is use- 



126 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 

less, and your church going mere mockery of God, if you 
have not plain obedience in you enough for this. Let every 
lady in the upper classes of civilised Europe simply vow that, 
while any cruel war proceeds, she will wear black; — a mute's 
black, — with no jewel, no ornament, no excuse for, or eva- 
sion into, prettiness. — I tell you again, no war would last a 
week. 

And lastly. You women of England are all now shrieking 
with one voice, — you and your clergymen together, — because 
you hear of your Bibles being attacked. If you choose to 
obey your Bibles, you will never care who attacks them. It 
is just because you never fulfil a single downright precept of 
the Book, that you are so careful for its credit : and just 
because you don't care to obey its whole words, that you are 
so particular about the letters of them. The Bible tells you 
to dress plainly, — and you are mad for finery ; the Bible tells 
you to have pity on the poor, — and you crush them under 
your carriage-wheels; the Bible tells you to do judgment 
and justice, — and you do not know, nor care to know, so 
much as what the Bible word 'justice means' Do 
but learn so much of God's truth as that comes to ; know 
what He means when He tells you to be just: and teach 
your sons, that their bravery is but a fool's boast, and their 
deeds but a firebrand's tossing, unless they are indeed Just 
men, and Perfect in the Fear of God ; — and you will soon 



WAK. 127 

have no more war, unless it be indeed such as is willed by 
Him, of whom, though Prince of Peace, it is also written, ' la 
Righteousness He doth judge, and make war.' 



THE ESD. 



